“THE IMPORTANT THING TO KNOW ABOUT ASSASSINATIONS IS NOT WHO FIRED THE GUN, BUT WHO PAID FOR THE BULLETS.”

—ERIC AMBLER, A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS, 2001

The campaign against Castro had gone on longer than most people knew. On December 11, 1958, two days after William Pawley met with Batista, a blond, ruggedly handsome American stepped off a plane from Key West in Havana and registered at the Commodore Hotel as George R. Collins. His true name was Alan Nye, a naval reserve pilot from Miami who was covertly on the payroll of the Dominican Republic's president, Rafael Trujillo. Trujillo's technicians had customized a sniper rifle for him, and he was offered a $100,000 bounty to bring down Fidel. One of Castro's patrols intercepted Nye on his way up the Sierra Maestra Mountains. After he was captured, Nye was afforded a revolutionary trial and convicted. Castro ordered him released, and Nye returned to Chicago.1

Trujillo now went big, forming the Foreign Legion of the Caribbean to defend against Cuban attacks. Interestingly, one of his volunteers was Felix Rodriguez, whose uncle had been Batista's finance minister and who himself had been educated in an exclusive boarding school in Pennsylvania. Rodriguez went on to become a star spook for the CIA. His tour de force was the tracking of Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle in 1968 that resulted in his capture and execution.² Che had struck out into the South American jungle in search of converts. The CIA was trying to corner him and his party, but Che traveled only at night. That gave the Agency a bright idea. The Mark Hurd Aerial Survey company, also based at the Santa Barbara airport, was doing aerial surveys for a new highway in Bolivia. The Agency knew that Che's party emitted body heat, and the ovens they used for cooking emitted heat. The aerial survey planes tracked heat sources on infrared film. Each day, the film would be flown to Santa Barbara, processed, and mounted on a Hurd hangar wall, tracing Che's path through the Bolivian backcountry. At the ideal spot, the Che party was ambushed, and Che was killed on the orders of the CIA. Rodriguez celebrated the hit by lashing Che's body to a helicopter skid like a trophy animal and taking off.3

Under Trujillo's direction, Johnny Abbes set up several attempts on Castro's life in 1959. Abbes borrowed a swift cabin cruiser, the Violynn III, from an interested civilian and landed a squad of eight Dominican commandos on the Cuban shore in predawn darkness. Through a winter downpour, the commandos crept into position beside a road leading to a cemetery where Castro was due to officiate at a burial ceremony. As Castro's motorcade rolled past, a spotter, recognizing Castro's number-one bodyguard, Captain Alfredo Gamonal, gave the signal. Automatic arms fire raked Gamonal's jeep, killing him, the driver, and a local dignitary. But Castro, unaccountably riding in the next-to-last jeep, escaped unharmed. From that day forward, the Cuban leader went to elaborate lengths to avoid precise scheduling. Back in Cuidad Trujillo, Abbes told his aide, “He may have nine lives. But if so, I'll try a tenth time.”⁴

Abbes wasted no time in trying again. Through an intermediary, he rented a downtown Havana apartment that overlooked the studios of television station CMQ, where Castro frequently delivered an impromptu speech to the nation. Then he propositioned a yanqui who was a former competition sharpshooter to squeeze the trigger for a $25,000 down payment and a cool $1 million upon scoring a clean hit. The rifleman insisted Abbes provide a bench-adjusted carbine with a telescopic sight and non-deflecting muzzle silencer. “Dominican ordnance experts immediately went to work to produce the rifle,” recalled General Espaillat. “The weapon was completed and en route to Cuba when Trujillo cancelled the project…. He was afraid of Washington's fury. I really think that Fidel would be dead now if the plot had not been called off.”5

In May 1959, a few weeks after Castro's return from his meeting with Nixon in Washington, DC, Frank Sturgis deserted Fidel's cause the instant agrarian reform was enacted.⁶ Sturgis was a man of action, but a victim of impulse. One night in the lobby of the Havana Hilton, he spotted Fidel, ringed by bodyguards, talking with a beautiful woman. When the Castro party turned to leave, Sturgis approached the woman and in a low voice told her that he knew who she was, then advised her that he was with the American Embassy. The woman was Marita Lorenz, who met Castro onboard her father's cruise liner Berlin. When it docked in Havana harbor, a launch flying the revolutionary flag had pulled alongside the ship, and twenty armed barbudos (“bearded revolutionaries”) in olive fatigues with hand grenades dangling from their belts boarded. Women in evening gowns and their dinner-jacketed husbands scurried into hiding, thinking it was a bandit raid. But their leader, obviously enjoying the commotion, shouted, “I am a friend. I like Americans.”⁷ It was Fidel Castro. “My father spoke Spanish and he got along well with Castro,” Lorenz recalled to Paul Meskill of the New York Daily News (in “Secrets of the CIA,” April 20, 1975). Her father took Castro and his men on a tour of the ship, but asked that the Cubans leave their guns outside before sitting down to dinner. Castro sat between the captain and his daughter and, before the meal was over, offered Marita a job as his secretary. She declined because she was planning to return to Germany to finish her education.

Two weeks later, when Lorenz arrived in New York aboard the Berlin, two Cuban officers sent her a message, saying that Castro was in desperate need of a translator, and urged her to take the job offered. A plane was standing by ready to take her to Havana. As Marita explained to Sturgis, “I made a big mistake, I got on that plane.”⁸

Fidel occupied a suite in the Hilton, and Marita did some office tasks for him, then shortly became his mistress.⁹ One day, when the premier was gone, his aides drove Marita to the prison on the Isle of Pines to show her the cell where Castro had been incarcerated years before. Once she was inside, they shut the door and locked her in. Apparently rumors had been sweeping Havana that the premier was keeping a foreign girl at the Hilton, and this was their way of keeping a lid on the story. After a week, Marita was brought back to the Hilton under virtual house arrest.

Sturgis heard of her predicament and approached her in hopes of recruiting an agent in close proximity to Castro.10 He asked for her collaboration in return for help getting out of Cuba.Marita began reporting to Sturgis on conversations Castro had with visitors and stealing confidential documents. “Fidel had papers strewn all over,” Lorenz recalled in conversation with Sturgis, “one filing cabinet was never locked. It was full of money, papers, documents and maps.”

The romance ended soon and unhappily when Marita became pregnant, though not with Fidel's child.¹¹ With the American Embassy's help, she returned to New York. Sturgis, in concert with Alexander Rorke, a confidant of William Pawley, pressured her to return to Cuba armed with two poison capsules.¹² Her mission was to slip them into Castro's coffee. The plotters told her that the poison was odorless and tasteless and that Castro would die quickly. To the surprise of no one involved in these melodramatic attempts on Castro, the operation went wrong when Lorenz hid them in a jar of cold cream to avoid discovery at the airport. When she reunited with Castro at the Hilton, Marita dug the capsules out of the jar in the bathroom only to find them glutinous and greasy, in no state to be used in coffee. She flushed them down the toilet and subsequently returned to Miami the next day.¹³ Fidel, unaware that Lorenz had betrayed him, lived on.

Poison capsules destined for Fidel became the chosen assassination scenario for a completely different group.¹⁴ As part of the Bay of Pigs invasion planning, the CIA ordered an assassination attempt for Castro. Richard M. Bissell contacted the Mafia to handle the case, but had them coordinate with the Security Office, rather than with his office directly. An official of the Security Office, Jim O'Connell, was given the liaison job. He called in Robert Maheu, an old CIA collaborator and member of the FBI in his youth, because he knew that Maheu had an established relationship with the Mob. O'Connell asked him whom he would recommend for the job of killing Fidel Castro. Maheu recommended Johnny Rosselli. “Then we'll give him the job,”15 replied O'Connell.

John Rosselli was linked to Sam Giancana, head of the Chicago Mafia, and Santos Trafficante of the Florida Mafia. In the 1950s, the three had used Cuba as a base and route for the drug trade, as an abortion center, and as a place for other illegal activities. Rosselli was linked to the labor unions and government officials in Cuba before and during the Batista administration. When Maheu asked him to take care of Castro, Rosselli asked who was behind the plot. Maheu replied that a US economic group that had suffered losses in Cuba was the sponsor. Rosselli demurred, “Well, if it isn't an official matter, I'm not going to offer my services.”¹⁶ Only when Maheu introduced the hit man to O'Connell did the operation get a green light.

After several meetings in New York and Miami between O'Connell, Rosselli, Giancana, and Trafficante, the Mafia was offered a contract of $50,000 for the hit.¹⁷ Now the brainstorming began. Giancana suggested an ambush on a street corner in Havana, using a machine-gun to bring Castro down. The CIA accepted the idea and began looking for recruits in Cuba. But they soon realized that Castro's security system would make it impossible to pull off.

Rosselli suggested that the CIA had to develop a clever way to pull off the assassination and still give the assassin a minimum time to escape. Thus, the famous poison capsules came into play. The agency turned over the request to the head of their laboratories, Joseph Schreider, to prepare a suitable poison with the desired properties; it would kill but with a sufficiently delayed action to give the person administering it time to escape. In a few weeks, Schreider had new capsules ready in the form of little nylon bags which contained a synthetic botulism, a very active substance that dissolved only in cold liquids and only began to have an effect two to three hours after ingestion. The synthetic botulism would produce no symptomology of poisoning and also leave no traces. There was a significant problem with the capsules, however, in that handling them was dangerous. If the assassin touched them or didn't wash his hands well, he could be contaminated.18

Despite that caveat, and apparently throwing caution to the winds, Rosselli took the capsules to Florida in March 1961 to meet with Santos Trafficante, who arrived at the meeting with an unsmiling Cuban with close-cropped gray hair and sunglasses in his fifties.¹⁹ This turned out to be Tony Varona, planner of the pending Bay of Pigs invasion and an old collaborator of the Florida Mob boss. Varona and the other planners of the invasion believed that if Castro was taken simultaneously, a leaderless nation would be more vulnerable to attack. So he was delighted to join the Rosselli/Maheu plot. His counterrevolutionary organization in Cuba, Rescate, would take responsibility for the delivery of the capsule mission. At the meeting in Miami, Varona took possession of the poison capsules from Rosselli and $10,000 cash from Maheu. The CIA insisted that the action not be carried out until they gave the signal. This was to be their downfall.

At the end of March 1961, Varona called the Havana home of one of the Rescate leaders, Alberto Cruz Caso, and asked him to send a courier of absolute confidence to Miami.²⁰ The courier arrived quickly from Havana, since there were still flights every forty-five minutes at that time, and Varona gave him the capsules and complete instructions for Caso, explaining that timing was important due to the nature of the lethal botulism. It was critical that Castro's death would be attributed to natural causes, so the United States would not be implicated. Rescate began to look for the right time and place to carry out the mission, making arrangements with two of their cells; employees of casinos belonging to Trafficante and the Pekin Restaurant, occasionally patronized by Castro.

Members of Rescate continued making their arrangements with the understanding that they needed a go-ahead signal from Varona but unaware that the deadline for the invasion was approaching. A few days before D-Day, April 14, 1961, CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, who was in charge of security for Varona and the other five members of the provisional government for Cuba, became suspicious of one member, Manolo Rey, a Kennedy liberal. Hunt viewed Rey as embodying “Fidelism without Fidel,” which made him a security risk who might “inform the enemy” of the invasion details.21 To preclude such treachery, Hunt proposed that all the provisional government members be summoned to New York on a pretext then told that invasion day was near and that “for personal and operational security those who wanted to learn the assault plans—and be flown to the beachhead—would have to agree to isolation from that time on.”²² So the six members were herded into the confines of the Lexington Hotel in New York City. From there, a blacked-out CIA plane flew the six men to the Opa-locka airfield near Miami, where they were held incommunicado awaiting the call to take off for the beachhead.

Varona could only pace back and forth inside the isolated hut. His Rescate hit squad was ready in Havana, where Castro was due to show up at the Pekin Restaurant on busy Twenty-Third Street at the target time. Santos Trafficante had an asset employed at the restaurant, actually the dishwasher. But the signal to activate the assassination could not be sent because Maheu couldn't reach Varona. It wouldn't have mattered in any event. Cuban G-2 General Fabian Escalante told me when we met in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that the order was never given, but even if it had been, the criminal plans of the would-be assassins would not have been successful.²³ Apparently, news of the upcoming invasion had leaked, but it was not known exactly where the landing would take place. Escalante said the G-2 had already taken the necessary precautions and the security of the head of the revolution was assured. The dishwasher was a double agent.

Around the middle of April, G-2 increased its arrests of Havana-based counterrevolutionaries. Several members of Rescate were detained, and the poison capsules apparently ended up in the toilet. A fitting end for such a tragic comedy.

Nixon had demonstrated his approval of assassination as a political tool; he never saw a proposal he didn't like. In October 1960, Nixon played golf with exiled leader Mario Garcia Kohly, who laid claim to having a formidable guerilla force inside Cuba. When he became an exile in 1959, Kohly fell into the social set of Charles “Bebe” Rebozo and, ergo, Nixon. The proposal was nothing less than premeditated murder. According to an affidavit executed several years later by Kohly's son, during his golf game with Kohly, Nixon agreed “to the elimination of the leftist officials.”24

Kohly fully expected that Nixon would be the next president of the United States, and he saw himself as the next president of Cuba. He bragged to Nixon that his organization was the de facto government of Cuba in exile, and that he had an invasion plan in place. It was a risky move for Nixon, since he was locked into a tight contest with JFK for the presidency. Kennedy had been using the Cuba situation on the campaign trail, saying that he would have treated Cuba very differently during the last years of the Batista regime, “but that now we must make clear our intention…to enforce the Monroe Doctrine…and that we will not be content till democracy is restored to Cuba. The forces fighting for freedom…in the mountains of Cuba should be sustained.”²⁵ Nixon, of course, knew about the training of Cuban exiles underway, but he could not sound too vehement in defending the Eisenhower administration's role: “We must recognize that there is no ‘quick and easy solution’ to Castro's threat; but given the opportunity and time the people of Cuba will find their way back to freedom.”

What Nixon seemed not to know was that Kohly was engaged in a counterfeiting operation that would flood the Cuban economy with $50 million of counterfeit pesos, bringing chaos to the financial markets.²⁶ It was, unfortunately, a sting operation set up by the CIA to discredit Kohly. An agent who said he wanted to help overthrow Castro for patriotic reasons contacted Kohly to provide assistance in getting the counterfeit peso plates engraved. He assured Kohly that it was perfectly legal to manufacture counterfeit Cuban money as long as it was used for the subversion of the Castro regime. The agent introduced him to “Bill Martin,” an alleged printer who turned out to be a Secret Service special agent working undercover. Kohly was given the counterfeit-peso engraving plates that he was supposed to turn over to Bill Martin. When he met Martin in a hotel room in New York, Kohly was promptly arrested by the Secret Service and charged with conspiring to counterfeit Cuban currency. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison.²⁷

But Nixon stuck with him, as evidenced by the letter over his signature sent to the judge in the case, Edward Weinfeld, from his law firm, Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, and Alexander. In the letter, he gives a personal commendation of Kohly's character and offers Kohly's patriotism as a reason for his actions. Nixon explains that “the complexities of United States policy toward the Castro regime…might well have created an atmosphere in which a person such as Kohly could honestly…believe that actions such as those for which he was convicted were not contrary to the interests of the United States.”28 Nixon asks the judge for “consideration of the defendant's application for suspension or reduction of the sentence imposed.”

As the White House action officer in the war against Castro, Richard Nixon was a failure. Now in 1961, a superannuated Nixon had one more shot at success, in fact a double one. A lieutenant commander in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) at the Guantanamo Naval Base who had known Nixon since World War II rallied to his cause and placed him in civilian charge of twin assassination plots scheduled for the revolutionary holiday of the 26th of July, barely three months after the Bay of Pigs.²⁹ Both Fidel and Raul Castro would be appearing in public on that day, Fidel in Havana, leading a celebration for Soviet space hero Yuri Gagarin; and Raul in Santiago, speaking at ceremonies marking the anniversary of the Moncada Barracks attack.

One of the assassins, Luis Balbuena, had long been under ONI control and was considered valuable because of his personal friendship with Fidel and Raul Castro. Balbuena, a thickset man called El Gordo (“the Fat One”) had joined the 26th of July Movement in the struggle against Batista, but, as reported by a Miami police detective who interviewed him, “Early in 1959, he, with other top members of the revolution, started conspiring against the government. He was the contact between the US Naval Intelligence and the Oriente underground.”³⁰ Balbuena was an elected official of an anti-Castro council of Cubans employed at Guantanamo Naval Base, promoting counterrevolutionary actions.

The second marksman was Alonzo Gonzales, about whom little is known other than that he was an Episcopalian priest who had designs on becoming bishop of Cuba once Castro was deposed. He claimed to have been trained at the CIA Academy in Virginia, known as the Farm. Balbuena admitted to a US Senate investigator that he had worked with Gonzales out of Guantanamo in 1961 and confirmed that the ambitious priest was proficient with firearms.31

Gonzales slipped out of Guantanamo, heading for Havana, but vanished without a trace. Balbuena told the Miami police that he “was involved in an attempt to assassinate Raul Castro,” which was “discovered by the Cuban government,” forcing him to take sanctuary inside the naval base.³²

Two weeks after the 26th of July holiday passed without incident, Industry Minister Che Guevara read off a list of American aggressive acts against Cuba at the hemispheric nations’ conference in Uruguay.³³ Among them was the charge that the United States had mounted an assassination attempt of Raul Castro (no mention was made of Fidel) from the Guantanamo Naval Base on July 26. Guevara said the plot was for the killing to be followed by a mortar shelling of the base, giving the impression that enraged Cubans were taking revenge for Raul's death at the hands of counterrevolutionaries. The shelling would give the United States a “clear-cut case” of Cuban aggression and provide a pretext for armed intervention—the old Guantanamo shell game.³⁴

In September 1960, Fidel Castro journeyed to New York to attend the annual General Assembly of the United Nations.³⁵ The CIA apparently viewed this as an opportunity to do him in that would render all the other clandestine operations moot. Castro himself sensed the danger. After taking off from Havana, he asked his security chief, Ramiro Valdes, if a Cuban Air Force plane would escort them to New York. Valdes hadn't considered it. “If I was running the CIA,” Castro remonstrated, “I'd shoot down this plane over water and report it was an accident.”

While Castro bear-hugged Khrushchev and pumped the hand of Egypt's Abdal Nasser on the floor of the United Nations, the Agency was hosting a hospitality suite in the Waldorf-Astoria to entertain New York policemen assigned to protect the Cuban leader. As David Wise and Thomas B. Ross tell it in The Espionage Establishment, “Chief Inspector Michael J. Murphy wandered into the suite and was approached by a CIA man with a chilling story. The agency had a plan, the CIA man recounted casually, to plant a special box of cigars at a place where Castro would smoke one. When he did so, the agent said, the cigar would explode and blow his head off. Murphy, who could scarcely believe his ears, was appalled, since his responsibility was to protect Castro, not inter him. If the CIA man was pulling Murphy's leg, it was a shockingly foolish subject to joke about.”36 But, much worse yet, the agent seemed completely in earnest. This was obviously such a Rube Goldberg scheme that it is not surprising that it didn't work.

As one of the well-known “soldiers of fortune,” in 1963 Ed Arthur was approached by Sam Benton, well-known in Miami as a commission broker for Cuban exile groups and coincidentally a former lieutenant for Mike McLaney at the Casino Internacional, for an assassination attempt on Castro.³⁷ He was taken to a mansion on the canal in Miami and interviewed by a swarthy businessman. He did not know whom he was meeting, but he did know that despite his desire to ouster Castro, he did not want to be involved in murder. So Ed declined the honor.

When I interviewed him in 1974, Arthur recognized a photograph of Mike McLaney as the swarthy man who had propositioned him. From his description I identified the location of the property and visited it on a trip to Miami. I went to the assessor's office and established the address for the property. When I visited the property, I spoke with the caretaker, and he identified the absent owner as Mike McLaney, ex-proprietor of the Hotel Nacional casino in Havana. The house was currently occupied by the ex-dictator of Venezuela, Perez Jimenez, and his mistress, Marita Lorenz, who had earlier been involved with Fidel Castro.³⁸ Perez Jimenez was later extradited to Venezuela for alleged crimes there. We can only assume that Lorenz moved on to greener pastures.