“I'D FIND A PROPER LEGAL COVER AND GO IN. THERE ARE SEVERAL JUSTIFICATIONS THAT COULD BE USED LIKE PROTECTION OF AMERICAN CITIZENS LIVING IN CUBA AND DEFENDING OUR BASE AT GUANTANAMO.”1

—RICHARD NIXON TO JOHN F. KENNEDY,
MEETING AT THE WHITE HOUSE, APRIL 1961

At midday on December 15, 1971, the radio in the Miami offices of the Bahamas Line blared out a distress call from one of the company's ships. It was Captain Jose Villa, a Cuban exile who was the skipper of the 1,400-ton Johnny Express. He was being pursued by a Cuban Navy gunboat and was turning north to elude it. The ship was en route to Miami after discharging cargo at Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Its position was not far from Little Inauga Island in the lower Bahamas.

At 12:55 p.m., Captain Villa reported that the gunboat was closing in. At 1:00 p.m., he said he had been ordered to heave to. “Don't stop,” Bahamas Line official Francisco Blanco radioed. “You are in international waters.”²

At 1:30 p.m., Villa, his voice urgent, reported Johnny Express under fire and himself wounded. Nine minutes later, he screamed into the microphone, “They are shooting at us from close range.”

At 2:00 p.m., Blanco, after hurried consultation with other company officials, advised Villa to try to beach his ship. “We are going to keep going until they sink us,” the captain defiantly replied. Then radio contact was lost. Finally, at 2:20, p.m., Villa came back on the air, saying the gunboat was firing at his radio mast. He begged for help. Ten minutes later, he began his final transmission: “The deck is covered with blood. I am dying, chico. Tell the Coast Guard to come quickly. Tell them there are dead and wounded here.”

The gunboat rammed and boarded the Johnny Express, then took it in tow to a Cuban port. Villa and two wounded crewmen were rushed to a hospital. Although it appeared to be an outrageous act of piracy, the initial reaction from the Nixon White House was strangely subdued. Press Secretary Ron Ziegler deplored the attack as “a violation of international practice” but said that since the Johnny Express flew the Panamanian flag, it was a matter for Panama to deal with. In fact, a sister ship of the Johnny Express had been bloodlessly seized by the Cubans twelve days earlier, with scarcely a whisper of protest.

The uncommon quiet in Washington was necessitated by the fact that the barrage of accusations being laid down by Havana Radio to justify the seizure was essentially true. The Cubans charged that the Johnny Express was owned by CIA front men, had landed “agents, arms and explosives” in Cuba for the CIA on three occasions in 1968 and 1969, and had been used as a mother ship two months earlier to launch and retrieve a fast motorboat that had raked the seaside town of Boca de Sama with machine-gun fire, killing and wounding civilians. That night, Miami television station WTVJ broadcast an editorial, “James Bond May Be Needed,” which asserted that the Johnny Express might have been more than an innocent noncombatant. The station showed a Coast Guard “intelligence photo” of the ship with what appeared to be a 20-foot inboard boat with a fast hull design sitting on the cargo deck.

The Johnny Express was operated by the brothers Santiago and Teofilo Babun, the American success stories of a large family that had emigrated from Lebanon a generation earlier. Others of the Babun family had settled in Haiti, where they became influential in governmental affairs. Still others had gone across the Windward Passage to Oriente Province in Cuba, where they prospered in commerce. Santiago and Teofilo belonged to the Oriente branch of the family, all of whom hopscotched to Miami when Castro took power. When Santiago Jr. joined Brigade 2506, the proud father prepared his own contribution—a 173-foot vessel that he fitted with guns at his own expense. His generosity was cruelly thwarted when the invasion occurred before the work on the boat was complete.

In 1964, Santiago's cousin, Rudolph Babun, the Haitian consul in Miami, was implicated in the smuggling of T-28 airplanes to Haiti and was forced to leave the United States. In 1968, the year that Havana Radio claimed the Johnny Express was first used to drop off arms and agents in Cuba, Santiago Jr. and Teofilo were arrested by Miami police after a huge cache of explosives was found in the Bahamas Lines yards. The Babun family was clearly not unfamiliar with military devices.

If Washington was playing down the incident because of the potential CIA angle, Richard Nixon, at his Florida White House on Key Biscayne, was playing it up. He had Captain Villa's wife and three children brought to the compound and was photographed with a comforting arm around her shoulders while branding the seizure as an unconscionable act and demanding Villa's immediate release. Perhaps taking a cue from the commander in chief, the Pentagon and State Department warned Cuba that all measures allowed by international law would be taken to prevent a recurrence, and air and sea patrols would be doubled. Havana Radio answered that gunboats would not hesitate to capture any vessel believed engaged in “counterrevolutionary activities.”

The record of history is unclear as to what Nixon, standing with his arm around Isabel Villa, told the poor woman to comfort her. Nor is it known whether he told her the truth behind her husband's fate or the story of his own role in it. If he did, she got an earful. For Nixon was rekindling the secret war from the cold coals of the Kennedys.

And yet Nixon's revisionist toasting of communist leaders in the faraway halls of Moscow and Beijing was marked by the absence of even a tip of the hat to the communist in neighboring Havana. The signal was clear enough to the CIA and the Miami exiles. The secret war against Castro was to take some new shots. Some of them were Dr. Strangelove dirty.

During 1969 and 1970 the CIA deployed futuristic weather modification technology to ravage Cuba's sugar crop and thus undermine the economy. Planes from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the California desert, where high tech was developed, overflew the island, seeding rain clouds with crystals that precipitated torrential rains over nonagricultural areas and left the cane fields arid. The downpours even caused killer flash floods in some areas.

In March 1970, a US intelligence officer passed a vial of the African swine fever virus to a terrorist group. The vial was taken by a fishing trawler to Navassa Island, which had been used in the past as an advance base by the CIA, and was smuggled into Cuba. Six weeks later, Cuba suffered the first outbreak of the swine fever in the Western Hemisphere. Pig herds were decimated, causing a serious shortage of pork, the nation's dietary staple. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization called it the “most alarming event” of the year and futilely tried to track down “how the disease had been transmitted.”

The Nixon administration saw a renewed series of CIA-supported attempts on Castro's life. Gerry Patrick Hemming's exile group was involved in a triple-play assassination plot when Castro was the guest of Salvador Allende in Chile in October 1971. Castro was to be shot with a trick gun inside a camera upon his arrival in Santiago. The camera-gun plot was confirmed by Antonio Veciano, who had been a financier for the anti-Castro underground in Cuba for many years. Veciano said he was instructed by his case officer, Maurice Bishop, to organize the shoot.3 “It was very similar to the assassination of Kennedy,” Veciano stated, “because the person Bishop assigned to kill Castro was going to get planted with papers to make it appear he was a Moscow Castro agent who turned traitor, and then he himself would be killed.” The forged papers were supplied by a former Batista security agent named Luis Posada Carriles, who had enlisted for the Bay of Pigs and later was afforded intelligence training by the CIA.⁴

The assassination attempt misfired by the merest chance. “We had TV cameras with machine guns mounted inside to kill Castro during his speech,” Veciano said, “but one agent had an appendicitis attack and we had to rush him to the hospital. The other agent said he wouldn't do it alone.”⁵ The plotters had a backup plan to kill Castro when he toured a mountain copper mine near Antofagasta in Chile's north country. This only failed because of Castro's nine-lives type luck. The premier was driven up a narrow winding road to the mine site. Halfway up, a disabled car blocked the road, forcing Castro's vehicle to stop. There were four hundred pounds of dynamite in the car, wired to an electric detonator. The plunger was pushed, but the dynamite failed to explode.

The third attempt was made when Castro stopped off in Peru on his way home from Chile. It was planned for the moment when Castro appeared at the door of his Ilyushin jet upon landing at the Lima airport for a state dinner with President Juan Velasco Alvarado. A Beechcraft Baron with a 20-mm cannon behind its door was positioned on an apron where it could blast away at Castro then make a quick getaway. However, the Ilyushin unexpectedly pulled into a special security area, blocking it from the Beechcraft. The pilot of the assassination plane perhaps understandably refused to taxi it to another position because it would blow his chance of escape.

By Gerry Hemming's account, the fall of 1970 saw a scheme so fantastic that it seemed to plagiarize pulp novels.6 It began when the Cuban exile crews of Florida fishing boats decided to suspend hostilities long enough to make a quick buck. In a kind of floating-commodities exchange, they swapped staples with their Cuban counterparts—coffee and flour, in short supply in Cuba, for lobsters and fish that brought a premium price on the American market. The bootlegging became so lucrative that a Cuban P-4 patrol boat began escorting the Florida boats in and out of the small port of Cayo Bahia de Cadiz to expedite the trading.

The crew of one fishing boat, the Linda, became friendly with Fidel's P-4 crewmen, who eventually talked about going to the United States. A plan was proposed in which the P-4 would escort the Linda out of port and keep going all the way to Key Biscayne—at a time when Nixon was in residence in his compound—and, with its Cuban markings plainly visible, open fire on Chez Nixon. It was meant to be a provocation sufficient to touch off an invasion of Cuba. If Nixon were killed or injured, that would be too bad, but also more provocative: a perfect specimen of the Caribbean plot mentality. “What do you think Spiro Agnew would have done about six hours later,” Hemming said, “thinking it was a Castro operation?”⁷

The plan had reached the stage at which two planes had been acquired to fly the conspirators out of the country when it was aborted by an insider's tip to the Secret Service for the usual reward. A few days later, the Linda was tied up on the Miami River, the crew aboard under house arrest, when Nixon floated by on Charles “Bebe” Rebozo's houseboat, the Coco Lobo. Unaware that he had been deemed expendable by the unhappy Cuban exiles glaring out of the portholes at him, the president yelled greetings while Rebozo obligingly pulled the Coco Lobo over so his friend could shake some Cuban hands. Hemming was nervous because the crew was drunk and had automatic carbines on their bunks, but they wouldn't even give Nixon the time of day.