“VIOLENCE FIRST.”
—MOTTO FOR THE CUBAN STUDENT
REVOLUTIONARY DIRECTORATE (DRE)
After the Bay of Pigs failure, as the chief of the CIA Miami Division, Ted Shackley was in charge of the new second invasion, with Manuel Artime as field commander.1 Artime had been a member of the provisional government of Cuba in the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was currently running an anti-Castro action group called the Second Naval Guerrilla (“Guerrilla,” for short), based in Nicaragua, where strongman Luis Somoza was the beribboned honcho. The Guerrilla had been drilled at the CIA base Isolation Tropic in North Carolina.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy had made personal connections with Manuel Artime, including weekend skiing at a New Hampshire resort. The weekend wasn't just about skiing: it also concerned ways and means of getting rid of “that guy with the beard,” as Bobby referred to Castro.2 The result was that Artime was set up with a CIA retainer of $1,500 per month, and his Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria (MRR), now based in Nicaragua, was slated to receive $250,000 a month to launch the Second Naval Guerrilla, aimed at Cuban shipping. Artime's requests and demands carried a whiff of blackmail, as he exploited the Kennedys’ guilt over his time in prison after the Bay of Pigs.
It had been like old times in Little Havana.3 Artime's regimental battle flag, a gold trident on blue, hung outside recruiting headquarters. Volunteers banged on the door, and Bay of Pigs veterans were sought out as war fever spread through the exile colony. Recruits holding field maneuvers proudly told quizzical Miami police they were “training for the next invasion of Cuba.”
Arturo Rodriguez was a powerfully built man who liked his martinis. He was also a sergeant in the Cuban counterintelligence arm G-2 under General Escalante. I had a drink with Rodriguez in a bar in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, over the 1991 Labor Day weekend. He said G-2 had infiltrated Artime's camp in Nicaragua, recorded his radio transmissions, and tapped the phones.4 The plainclothes sergeant was bursting with pride as he told his story. The Somoza family had thrown the country open to units aiming for Castro. They operated out of Monkey Point, just south of Nicaragua's chief Caribbean port, Bluefields.
Rodriguez related that he managed to infiltrate the Monkey Point complex, tap telephones, and intercept some of the short-wave radio communications. Most were not encoded but composed in a deceptive way. The messages indicated that Artime intended to “double-up” the assassination of Fidel with the invasion.5
There was another effort in play to support Artime with an amphibious force sailing from the Dom Rep, landing in the east when Artime and the MRR landed on the south-side beaches. The leader of this invasion was Enrique “Harry” Ruiz-Williams, a personal favorite of Bobby Kennedy, who had been severely wounded at the Bay of Pigs. I interviewed Ruiz-Williams on November 28, 1973 in his Floralina Exploration Company office in Fort Lauderdale. I asked him why he was willing to risk getting his ass shot off. He retorted, “But I was also the red ass—I was mad at Castro and I also had a guilty complex [sic].”6 In Cuba, Ruiz-Williams had remained passive during the debauchery of the Batista regime.
Ruiz-Williams was recruited by Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, who arranged for him to deal directly with Cyrus Vance, the undersecretary of the army, in working out the details for the training of volunteers in the Dom Rep and for the invasion.7 In our interview, Harry pointed out the location of his base in the Dom Rep, at Montecristi in the northwestern part of the country. From there his expedition was supposed to shove off for a landing in the Oriente Province in eastern Cuba.
It became apparent that Bobby Kennedy was hands-on with the new plan to bring Castro down. Captain Bradley Ayers was an army ranger on detached duty to train the Cuban exiles. He recalled one evening in 1963 when he encountered RFK at a CIA base.8 Ayers was there to train exile underwater demolition teams and was taken to a CIA base deep in the Everglades. He could sense something big was in the works when he was attracted by the flapping sound of helicopter rotor blades, a rare intrusion to the dead silence of the Everglades. The pilot landed the craft in a small clearing, illuminated by lanterns. On the door was a logo of the Palm Beach Helicopter Service. Two men emerged from a Quonset hut to board the helicopter. One was Gordon Campbell, the JM/WAVE (the major CIA station in Florida) deputy chief, and the other was Robert Kennedy, attorney general of the United States, who presumably had ’coptered over from the family compound at West Palm Beach. Kennedy grasped Ayer's hand firmly and wished him good luck on his mission. In a hut, Campbell spread out maps and charts, explaining that RFK had just given the go-ahead for Ayer's underwater demolition teams to blow up ships in Cuban harbors.9
This invasion effort was seriously endangered when a Swift Boat from Artime's attack vessel, the Santa Maria, disabled a Spanish flag ship, the Sierra Aranzazu, which they had mistakenly identified as the pride of the Cuban fleet.10 They had poured a stream of fire into the ship until she went dead in the water, and they managed to kill three sailors, including the captain, and injure seventeen others. After an initial celebration, Artime was contacted with intelligence placing the Santa Maria far from the scene. He ordered the Swift Boat to take a closer look at the name of the ship and discovered its true identity. This incident caused such international repercussions that Artime had to fly to Madrid to try to placate Generalissimo Francisco Franco with a story naming Castro as the perpetrator of the incident. Franco didn't believe a word of his story.
After the Bay of Pigs invasion flopped, Pawley plotted on, his pocketbook still open to exile causes.11 His pet action group was the Cuban Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE), the same outfit that Rolando Cubela hoped would be his vehicle to the Presidential Palace. The DRE had been founded in 1956 by Eddie Chibás, a volatile figure who struck a dramatic note in Cuban politics by committing suicide while on the air. From its inception, the motto of the DRE had been “Violence first.” It was widely regarded as an unruly group of hotheads, and their action-oriented agenda attracted substantial funding from the CIA, although they didn't bow to agency supervision.12 Among the many celebrities dropping coins into the DRE's tin cup in admiration of its violent proclivities was Claire Booth Luce, the wife of Life magazine publisher Henry Luce and a Nixon-appointed ambassador to Italy.13
In August 1962, two armed motorboats slipped under the Havana Bay radar screen, past two Czech-built patrol craft. Their target was the Hotel Icar on the water's edge in suburban Miramar. The DRE underground inside Cuba had reported that often on late Friday nights, Fidel Castro and high-ranking officials went there for drinks and dinner. If all went well, Fidel and the officials would die in the gunning. As members of the DRE drew into position on the flat waters of the bay, the crews could make out uniforms moving back and forth in front of the Icar's picture windows. They opened fire. A Czech physician strolling on the hotel grounds saw the tracer bullets coming. “Their marksmanship was poor and they were pretty far out,” he later told newsmen.14 “But soon pandemonium ensued. Guests in nightgowns raced through the hotel. Panic seemed more dangerous than the effect of the raid.” The Icar was pockmarked with bullet holes, and its lobby was in shambles, but no one was seriously injured.
The pilot of one of the speedboats held a press session in New York, in which he identified himself as Mario Salvat of the DRE.15 He claimed that the strike was the first of many the action group had planned for the future. The New York Times printed the story, and the DRE was on its way. The attack on the Icar could easily have been reported as a terrorist action, which would have been closer to the truth.
DRE was the most militant of the exile groups. The rambunctious DRE was acquiring weapons for an invasion of Cuba in conflict with the CIA's own plans to launch a second try.16 Both were in violation of the Neutrality Act, which was under the jurisdiction of the FBI. The DRE's second invasion was privately funded, as opposed to the CIA/MRR effort headed by Artime. In November 1963, Ted Shackley, CIA chief in Miami, signaled headquarters that he disapproved of the DRE's invasion plan. For one thing, the plan called for a supply line too long for a covert operation, and for another, the DRE hotheads—who were on the agency payroll—were too unruly. But those were excuses: the actual reason was that the DRE stood to mess up the invasion plans of Artime and Ruiz-Williams, which didn't include the DRE. Shackley recommended red-lighting the DRE and cutting off its funds.17
The DRE was training and accumulating weapons out of a privately-owned resort property in Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, because the heat was on in Miami.18 Unfortunately for them, the FBI was tipped about an arms cache at the property, and the subsequent raid netted more than a ton of dynamite, twenty 100-pound aerial bomb casings, fuses and striker assemblies, a 50-pound container of plastic explosives and materials to make napalm. FBI chief Harry Maynard announced the results of the raid to the newspapers but declined to say if arrests were imminent. This was not surprising, since the FBI had already released the men they grabbed at the raid when they realized they had stumbled on a CIA operation involving Cuban nationals. The released men included Sam Benton; John Kock Gene, a DRE officer from Miami; several of Gene's paramilitaries; Rich Lauchli, a bomb maker for the Minute Men; and Victor Espinosa Hernandez, an exile paymaster and childhood friend of Rolando Cubela.19
The resort property was owned by Bill McLaney, brother to Mike McLaney, the former operator of the Casino Internacional in Havana. The Cuban bombing campaign discovered at Lake Pontchartrain was apparently funded and supported by Mike McLaney.20 After Castro closed the casinos in 1960, McLaney became the air marshal of a fleet of surplus B-26 light bombers in Florida. Coincidence or not, the original plans for the Bay of Pigs included five bomb raids on three refineries that were now processing Russian crude oil from the Baku region. Mike McLaney was all set to go when he received an urgent teletype from the Justice Department ordering him to call off the air strike. It turned out that the oil companies’ executives had gotten wind of his intent and used their clout to preserve their facilities. They were sure Castro would not last long.
After the Bay of Pigs debacle, Mike McLaney submitted another plan to the Agency to firebomb oil refineries in Cuba because he believed that the destruction of these facilities would paralyze the Castro war machine in weeks.21 Instead of getting his plan approved, McLaney received an urgent phone call warning him not to attempt such a thing under any circumstances. So he decided to ignore channels and set up his own campaign.
McLaney's contact with the exile action groups was Sam Benton. Tall, with horn-rimmed glasses offsetting sharp features and packing a pearl-handled revolver, he was a kind of commission broker to the groups. “Sam would never get near anything that might explode,” McLaney told me. “He lined up actions, arranged to fund and supply them, and took a cut off the top.” One Benton client was the Chicago-based Junta of the Government of Cuba in Exile (JGCE), headed by the shadowy Paulino Sierra Martinez, with Carlos Prío as its presidential designate. Sierra had been actively raising money for a Cuban invasion for several years, using a smokescreen by naming major national corporations. In fact, most of the funds came from the gambling syndicates eager to reopen in Havana, and from a conglomeration of private interests including McLaney.
The 30th of November Cuban exile group headed by Rolando “El Tigre” Masferrer was involved in an invasion attempt in 1963 that took some strange turns.22 According to a memo from Detective Sergeant C. H. Sapp of the Miami Police force, Masferrer arrived in Miami in August 1963 with a group of approximately sixty Cuban exiles from the New York City area. They were supposed to be joined by approximately forty more Cubans from the Miami area. Some of these Cubans sold their homes, sold their belongings, and quit their jobs in order to finance the invasion and follow Masferrer to Miami, and ultimately Cuba.
Upon arriving in Miami, the group began preliminary training in guerilla warfare but soon came to the attention of the local authorities.23 So Masferrer moved them to No Name Key for advanced training with Intercontinental Penetration Force, code name Interpen, a paramilitary group based in the Everglades. The training was more intense, but provisions were short, which created discontent among the exiles. Some of the Cubans grew tired of the delays and of being moved from place to place, so they began to pressure Masferrer about getting the invasion launched. He now told them that the original plans had been changed.
The original plan was for the group to make a commando raid on the northeast coast of Cuba, and then proceed to Manuel Artime's training camp in Nicaragua.24 Now Masferrer informed them that they were to invade Haiti and overthrow the government of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. With that accomplished, they could use Haiti as a jumping-off point to invade Cuba. The majority of the trainees were furious with this change in plans, so they defected from Masferrer's group and returned to Miami. Masferrer himself allegedly returned to New York City, taking a large amount of arms and ammunition with him.
After the Miami police raided a series of addresses in Miami (given to them by the Cuban defectors) that were supposed to be storage places for the supplies for the invasion and discovered nothing, they assumed that Masferrer had taken the materiel with him.25 The police concluded that the entire operation was nothing more than a fraud perpetrated by Masferrer to obtain funds from the Cuban exiles for his own use.