“REMEMBER THAT MORGAN, IN REALITY, WAS ALWAYS AN OFFICIAL OF THE NORTH AMERICAN SECRET SERVICES.”

—FIDEL CASTRO TO AUTHOR, 1978

William Alexander Morgan, wearing a gold-plated .45 pistol at his belt, was a soldier of fortune straight out of central casting. He was one of those footloose adventurers who latch onto each revolution as it comes along and emerge as freedom fighters. Morgan was one of those smooth operators who could sell a rowboat to Cunard Lines. He left his mark in Cuban history books as a freedom fighter in Castro's Cuban Revolution, for which he was awarded a Hero of the Cuban Revolution medal. It was typical of Morgan that before he received the honor he had already changed sides. As a hero of the revolution, Morgan lived it up. People swarmed around him on the streets, and he cadged free food and drinks. He had a suite at the Capri Hotel in Havana and was permitted to “liberate” a luxurious mansion on Sexta Avenue in the Miramar district that was owned by a fugitive Batistite.1

In 1959, Morgan was thirty-one years old, a physically powerful man with blond hair and hard blue eyes. He laughed heartily, loved a practical joke, and had a penchant for women and liquor. A dead-end kid from Toledo, Ohio, Morgan enlisted in the army, his stint distinguished by brawling, robbing, going AWOL, and overpowering a guard to escape from the stockade. After being discharged, he held a string of inconsequential jobs. It seems highly incongruous that with this checkered career behind him, he would play a pivotal role in an abortive invasion of Cuba that preceded the one at the Bay of Pigs by close to two years.

In the spring of 1958, Morgan found his way to Miami and joined the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE), composed mostly of former University of Havana students, backed by Carlos Prío, who were waging a guerilla war against Batista in the Escambray range. It was in the Escambray that the Morgan mystique was born. Morgan conned his way into the counterrevolutionary forces by fabricating a military background, which is how he got his rank of major in the Second National Front of the Escambray. He was assigned some military responsibilities, but he was so undisciplined that he was soon relieved of them and placed in the reserves.2 As David Grann so clearly explained in his article “The Yankee Comandante” in the New Yorker on May 28, 2012:

Morgan had composed a more philosophical statement about why he had joined the rebels. The essay, titled “Why Am I Here,” said:

Why do I fight here in this land so foreign to my own? Why did I come here far from my home and family? Why do I worry about these men here in the mountains with me? Is it because they were all close friends of mine? No! When I came here they were strangers to me I could not speak their language or understand their problems. Is it because I seek adventure? No here there is no adventure only the ever existent problems of survive [sic]. So why am I here? I am here because I believe that the most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others. I am here so that my son when he is grown will not have to fight or die in a land not his own, because one man or group of men try to take his liberty from him I am here because I believe that free men should take up arms and stand together and fight and destroy the groups and forces that want to take the rights of people away.

In his rush to overturn Cuba's past as well as his own, Morgan often forgot to pause for periods or paragraph breaks. He acknowledged, “I can not say I have always been a good citizen.” But he explained that “being here I can appreciate the way of life that is ours from birth,” and he recounted the seemingly impossible things that he had seen: “Where a boy of nineteen can march 12 hours with a broken foot over country comparable to the american Rockies without complaint. Where a cigarette is smoked by ten men. Where men do without water so that others may drink.” Noting that U.S. policies had propped up Batista, he concluded, “I ask myself why do we support those who would destroy in other lands the ideals which we hold so dear?”

Morgan sent the statement to someone he was sure would sympathize with it: Herbert Matthews. The Times reporter considered Morgan to be “the most interesting figure in the Sierra de Escambray.” Soon after receiving the statement, Matthews published an article about the Second Front and its “tough, uneducated young American” leader, citing a cleaned-up passage from Morgan's letter.

Other U.S. newspapers began chronicling the exploits of the “adventurous American,” the “swashbuckling Morgan.” The Washington Post reported that he had become a “daring fellow” by the age of three. The accounts were enough to “make schoolboys drool,” as one newspaper put it. A retired businessman from Ohio later told the Toledo Blade, “He was like a cowboy in an Ernest Hemingway adventure.” Morgan had finally willed his interior fictions into reality.3

Morgan traveled to Havana in 1959 as a principal in the proposed sale of Globemaster cargo planes to the Cuban government.⁴ He thought they might be in the market for the planes for defense purposes. On March 21, one of the Globemasters was flown in from a surplus storage yard in Arizona for inspection. Privately Morgan promised the Cubans he would personally train the paratroopers. On April 1, the Cuban government announced that it intended to purchase between four and ten of the planes from Morgan's company Akro Dynamics. The selling price was $375,000 each, a markup of $200,000. The Cubans came to realize that the pricing was outrageous, and negotiations were stopped short of a test ride. It is quite likely that it was Frank Sturgis who nixed the Globemaster sale. At the time, he was minister of the Air Force and was fully informed on current pricing on the surplus planes market.

All the while, Morgan was double-dealing with Trujillo.⁵ On February 24, 1959, he composed a long letter to the generalissimo detailing the training of Dominican exiles in Pinar del Rio Province in Cuba. The Cuban Revolution was contagious, he reported, and volunteers were streaming in. He was willing to betray Castro, he said, because the revolution was being betrayed. Not that Fidel was a communist, he explained, but Raul Castro and Che Guevara were, and the strategy and tactics of communism were taking over. On a personal sour note, Morgan disclosed that he and his men had been passed over for key positions in Castro's government, and now they weren't even being paid. He claimed that his Second Front force was virtually intact, and, with sufficient funding, could reestablish itself in the Escambray and do to Castro what Castro had done to Batista.

Trujillo reacted by calling for a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS), charging that Cuba was “exporting revolution” by its planned military aggression.6 Having set the stage, Morgan followed up by meeting with an emissary from Cuidad Trujillo. He was Fred Nelson, a wealthy, silver-haired American with Mob ties who had had business holdings in Cuba for more than a decade. When Castro took over, Nelson left for Miami posthaste with the first wave of Batista sympathizers. He aligned with the White Rose, a secretive counterrevolutionary organization composed of former soldiers of Batista's army, old politicians, and new capitalists. Their plans aligned perfectly with Trujillo's need for a fifth column and external support for an invasion. Morgan was offered one million dollars to bounce Fidel Castro from power, and after discussions with his fellow commander of the Second Front, Eloy Menoyo, he agreed to join the conspiracy. Nelson advised him that he would have to travel to Miami to firm up the plans with the Dominican consul there.⁷

The impulsive Rafael Trujillo lost no time in organizing the Cuban Liberation Army, which was composed of the evicted Batistanos with the aim of invading the island. In fact, in the days leading up to Batista's flight on New Year's Day 1959, he discussed the inevitability of Castro's takeover with his generals, raising the specter of the people's revolution spreading throughout the region and threatening the Dom Rep. Within one day of Castro's triumph, Rafael Trujillo set his plan in motion. He put the tough, brainy General Jose Pedraza in charge.⁸ It is notable that Pedraza was once cashiered by Batista for being too ambitious. During the hiatus in his military career, Pedraza ran his own private army using a cattle ranch as a front; his “cowboys” rivaled Masferrer's Tigres9 in cruelty and avarice.

According to General Fabian Escalante, head of Cuban G-2 counterintelligence, whom I interviewed on August 27, 1991, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, “The CIA knew about the plans and reported them to the highest levels of the US government. Richard Nixon, then vice president of the United States, was interested in the details and gave the Agency the green light to send a senior official to meet with Trujillo and evaluate the seriousness of the anti-Cuba project.” In February, Frank Bender (a.k.a. Gerry Droller) met with Trujillo and chief intelligence officer Johnny Abbes Garcia to appraise the plan.¹⁰ Bender didn't believe Castro was a communist, but he was on assignment. He said he felt that the Cuban Liberation Army could be deployed as a kind of police force whenever needed.¹¹ With Bender's nuanced endorsement, Trujillo was assured that the United States would look the other way. But according to Rufo Lopez-Fresquet, the Castro government's first treasurer, who later defected, the CIA also lent logistical support to Trujillo through the Double-Chek Corporation¹² in Miami.

Morgan's master plan¹³ called for the counterrevolution to be touched off by an air attack on Havana in which dynamite bombs would be dropped and explode in the air, causing a deafening noise while not injuring anyone—a psychological shock. At the same time, Morgan and his men would head for the Escambray and reconstitute the Second Front as a military force. In Miami, the White Rose would announce the start of the counterrevolution. The strategy called for Morgan and Eloy Menoyo of the Second Front to lead their force in a strike to seize and hold the airport at Trinidad, on the south coast. Then General Pedraza's eight-hundred-strong Cuban Liberation Army would be airlifted in from the Dom Rep, and on its heels, the mercenaries of the Anti-Communist Foreign Legion, numbering about six hundred. Rafael Trujillo wanted to bring in the mercenary army to add hardened steel to the venture. The nucleus was composed of members of the Spanish Foreign Legion who were loaned to Trujillo by Francisco Franco; many had fought alongside the German Blue Legion on the fascist side during the Spanish Civil War. Arms were to be airdropped to hundreds of Batista soldiers still hiding out in caves.

On April 15, 1959, Morgan traveled to Miami and made contact with the Dominican consul in that city. He explained the plan and the players and discussed reimbursements. It was decided that both Morgan and Pedraza would receive half a million dollars at the time of the invasion, and the other half would be placed in bank accounts. Morgan returned to Miami a week later to report on the progress of the conspiracy. At that time, he explained that Menoyo would participate in the plot only on the condition that the US government supported it. The Dominican consul provided Menoyo with the necessary assurances.14

The trips by Morgan and Menoyo to Florida began to arouse the suspicion that the G-2 was aware of their planned treason.¹⁵ So Menoyo suggested to Morgan that they inform Castro of the plot. They agreed not to mention the money received, much less the extent of the plans, so that they would have all the cards in their hands when the moment came. If the legion landed in Cuba and consolidated its positions, they could again switch sides.

The next day, Menoyo arranged for a secret meeting with Castro. At the meeting, Morgan and Menoyo reported on the conspiracy, justifying their initial silence on the pretext that they waited to see how serious the plans were.¹⁶ They gave Fidel all the details of the landing in Trinidad and the establishment of a provisional government in the Escambray Mountains. Castro authorized them to continue in the plot while providing information on a regular basis to his security agencies.

Meanwhile, the Dominican intelligence services distributed radio transmitters, directional antennas, and other necessary equipment to Morgan and the conspirators for the purpose of coordinating the progress of the plan. An arms deal was underway in Miami, and more funding flowed in to Trujillo from former Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez, who wanted to win favor in the hope that it might help him return to power at a later date.¹⁷

Through Morgan and Menoyo, the Castro security agencies soon were familiar with all the main elements of the conspiracy and began to move against it. On August 5, in Miami, Morgan picked up $170,000 in cash and a boatload of weapons from the White Rose exiles that were intended for the Second Front. He tipped off Castro and sailed to Havana harbor. According to General Escalante, Fidel inspected the booty: an entire arsenal which included forty 30-caliber machine guns, dozens of rifles, and a large supply of ammunition.18 On the same day, the G-2 detained a US embassy security officer named Sergeant Stanley F. Wesson as he directed a meeting of the underground planning to carry out sabotage and disruptions in support of the Cuban Liberation Army's arrival.¹⁹

Now Morgan began the penultimate confidence game.²⁰ From his Miramar mansion and Las Villas headquarters he established shortwave radio contact with Johnny Abbes in Cuidad Trujillo. At first, they communicated clumsily in a code based upon an English dictionary's pages, but soon the American was chattering like a jaybird in “pidgin” Spanish about the impending invasion. While keeping Abbes satisfied that all was well, Morgan sprung a trap on the conspiracy's leadership. He had Menoyo summon all members of his “provisional government,” among them the would-be president Arturo Hernandez Tellaheche and underground commanders, to the Miramar mansion for a final meeting.²¹

The place was packed. Also present were two members of the press: Jean Secon, a tall brunette representing United Press International, and Alex Rorke, who wangled an assignment from NBC television. Rorke had been contacted by a friend of Morgan's in New York to go to Havana if he wanted to film a rebellion. Suddenly, soldiers with machine guns surrounded the house and arrested its occupants. Castro was said to have been on the scene watching the arrests, taunting the big shots as they were led off, “And what were you going to be minister of?”²² The arrestees were hustled off to Camp Columbia, where they were held incommunicado in a theater until the invasion played out.

The following day, Morgan got on the radio to Johnny Abbes from Las Villas and told him that his Second Front troops were attacking Trinidad, and its fall was expected momentarily. He called for the invasion phase to begin. Then, with Jean Secon under detention, Morgan faked a United Press International wire story that reported a popular uprising in the Trinidad area.²³ But in Cuidad Trujillo confusion reigned. General Pedraza was overwhelmed by doubt, and Trujillo's advisors, particularly General Arturo Espaillat and intelligence analyst Robert Emmett Johnson, were firmer than ever in their conviction that the whole thing was a ruse.²⁴ Trujillo took a tentative step by dispatching a Dominican transport to drop more arms, but Morgan complained to Abbes that all the parachutes had been blown out to sea.

On August 12, Morgan went on the radio again with the electrifying news that the Second Front had taken Trinidad. “I hold the town and am fighting off government troops,” he told Abbes. “Send me arms.”25 Menoyo grabbed the microphone and exuberantly asked for a uniform similar to Trujillo's, to which the generalissimo sent a response that he would be rewarded with the country villa of the editor of Bohemia, a venerable Cuban magazine. The Dominican brain trust huddled around the radio in the National Palace, listening raptly as Morgan, with muffled explosions sounding in the background, described how pockets of resistance were being mopped up and peasants were joining the counterrevolution. Orson Welles could not have been more convincing.

Rafael Trujillo agreed to send a plane with his personal emissary that very evening. When the C-47 came to a halt on the Trinidad airfield, its propellers still spinning, out stepped a stout Spanish priest, father Ricardo Velazco. The cleric was greeted by shouts from Morgan's men of “Viva Trujillo! Down with Castro! Death to agrarian reform!” while others disguised as peasants lent credibility to the report of an uprising.²⁶ As gunfire was heard in the distance, Morgan and Fidel watched with amusement from behind a mango tree. Visibly moved, Velazco saluted from the staircase of the plane to several officials who applauded him. After the C-47 took off for its return to Ciudad Trujillo, Morgan got on the radio again with a request for machine-gun and mortar specialists. Thoroughly taken in by Velazco's enthusiastic report, Rafael Trujillo instructed General Espaillat to leave on a plane first thing in the morning and take charge of the forward elements. The invasion was on. He tapped Robert Emmett Johnson as the requested machine-gun expert, and assigned him double-duty as leader of the Foreign Legion. Almost desperately, both Espaillat and Johnson begged off.²⁷

The first plane that took off for Cuba on the morning of August 14 soon returned to base with engine trouble. Then General Pedraza balked at moving his Cuban Liberation Army until the Trinidad salient could be secured by airborne units. Finally, a C-47 with ten men aboard, including a Spanish Foreign Legionnaire as the mortar specialist and Cuban exile Captain Raul Betancourt as the machine-gun master, made the trip to Trinidad. As the craft rolled to a stop, it was hailed in the same lusty manner as the plane of the previous day. As the soldiers disembarked at the airstrip, which had been marked with lights, they could hear Morgan and his men shouting denunciations of Castro, and, as they joined in, the cries grew louder and more intense, converging, like voices at a stadium, in a deafening incantation: “Death to Castro!” But on a signal, Morgan's Cubans leveled their guns at the plane.28 Soldiers from the strike force drew their guns, and for a moment the plotters and the counter-plotters peered at one another, as if still puzzling over who had crossed whom. Then a few of Trujillo's men opened fire, and everyone began shooting. One of Morgan's friends ran toward the plane and was killed. By the time the fusillade ended, two members of the strike force had died, and the rest had been apprehended. The invasion was over before it began.²⁹

Rafael Trujillo placed a half-million-dollar bounty on Morgan's head. When Clete Roberts, the American broadcaster, visited Morgan's house, in September 1959, he found it surrounded by bodyguards with Thompson submachine guns. “I ought to tell you back in the United States that Mr. Morgan and I are sitting in what you might call an armed camp,” Roberts said.³⁰ He asked Morgan, “How does it feel to have a half-million-dollar price on your head?” Morgan replied coolly, “Well, it isn't too bad. They are going to have to collect it. And that's going to be hard.”

Castro reaped a propaganda windfall by casting Rafael Trujillo in the role of aggressor and charging that he had the support of the Organization of American States (OAS). The Dominican jefe was humiliated and stripped of the aura of invincibility that had rendered him the Caesar of the Caribbean. Chuckling that it was the “carcajada del ano” (joke of the year), Castro paraded the eight captured survivors from the C-47 before television cameras while playing tapes of Morgan's radio dialogues with Abbes.³¹

The Castro government made Morgan a Cuban “citizen by birth” and promised to protect him.³² The Associated Press wrote that he had obtained “almost legendary stature” on the island. Morgan further bolstered his reputation when he handed over to the Cuban government seventy-eight thousand dollars that he had received from the Dominican consul, asking that the money be invested in economic development in the Escambray region. When Morgan walked along the streets of Havana, people reached out to touch him; there was even a popular song celebrating his exploits.

On the afternoon of March 4, 1960, longshoremen were hours into unloading 7.5 tons of arms and ammunition from the French freighter Le Coubre in Havana harbor, the bulk being Belgian-made Fusil Automatique Lèger (FAL) rifles consigned to Castro's armories. In sight of the ship was the United States Interests Section, a squat edifice of plywood facing and an about-to-be-torn-down look. The building was hastily constructed after the rupture of relations and was now covered with pro-revolutionary graffiti. This symbol of American presence in Cuba was apparently as shabby inside as it was outside, according to an FBI agent posted there as legal attaché.33

Suddenly the bell towers of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba shuddered in a blast as Le Coubre exploded outward, according to accounts of witnesses who felt waves of heat as far away as a mile from the ship.³⁴ A huge black nimbus arose from shattered holds. It is estimated that seventy-five were killed and over two hundred wounded. Fidel, driving his town car, heard the blast on the Malecon. He sped to the scene and angrily pointed a finger at the United States. The odds are long against the cause being spontaneous or accidental. But if it was deliberate, who did it?

On April 23, 1974, I interviewed Gerry Patrick Hemming, one of a number of paramilitary volunteers in Castro's rebel army who deserted when the army shifted to the left. Hemming recalled that he was in the harbor area, and about three hours before the blast, he spotted William Morgan with a few of his men coming off the vessel, carrying as many rifles as they could. He told me that when he ran to the vessel after the explosion, he again encountered Morgan, perhaps the most recklessly ambitious of the genre, dockside wearing his gold-plated .45. At the time, Morgan was in Castro's favor after pulling off the elaborate political sting against Trujillo. Hemming and Morgan both drew their handguns as Fidel Castro screeched to a halt on the dock in his town sedan. “Your shot or mine?” Morgan asked Hemming. But the moment passed, and both holstered. Both Hemming and Morgan had participated in Castro's military missions, and Hemming was in the process of quitting because he saw Fidel's politics swinging to the left.

At the time of the Le Coubre incident, Morgan was still the leader of Prío's Second National Front of the Escambray and was secretly trying to organize the agricultural oligarchies of central Cuba's Las Villas Province region of ranchers, cattlemen, and sugar producers, known as the Texas of Cuba, into a fighting force to spring surprise on the rebel army. He even ran a frog farm as cover. Did Le Coubre’s cargo figure in another attempt to overthrow the Castro regime? Or did the CIA callously destroy it in line with Dulles's plan to deprive Cuba of weapons? In any case, William Morgan appears to be a chief suspect due to his own skill set and fitting the profile of method, motive, and opportunity.

From the dock, Castro hustled to the nearby studios of Cuba's flagship TV station CMQ. Preempting programming, he instinctively blamed the CIA, or a CIA affiliate. If Morgan's mission was to destroy weapons consigned to Castro, he was acting in a CIA capacity. If he was providing a large punctuation mark to the Agency's campaign of destruction and terror to drive Cuba into submission, he was with the CIA. Not even if it was an abortive attempt to rip off arms for Morgan's private army, which was partly subsidized by the Agency for the Bay of Pigs invasion tentatively set for one year, would the Agency be out of the picture.

The results of forensic testing on Le Coubre after the blast were inconclusive. In Washington, the CIA denied any knowledge of the ship's fate. The detonation of Le Coubre foreshadowed the start of the electoral season. Eisenhower finally gave his approval of Richard Nixon as the Republican nominee while John F. Kennedy won a cliffhanger for the Democratic nod. What emerged as a prime issue in the campaign was “the Cuba thing.” It became a contest as to who was more militant on the subject.

Morgan's double-dealing and anti-communist stance began to tell against him.35 On October 21, 1960, Morgan was charged with conspiring against the regime. As General Escalante put it, he was arrested as he tried to organize—for the CIA—a band of counterrevolutionaries in the Escambray Mountains for the purpose of providing support for an invasion that was planned for the following months.36 The Bay of Pigs invasion, which went on the CIA's drawing board during the Eisenhower administration, originally called for guerilla actions, and this was apparently to be Morgan's role. The chief witness against him was a youth he had selected as his chauffeur who delivered weapons to the Second Front in the Escambray, the same units he had duped during the Trujillo affair. Morgan also used his frog-farm trucks as transport.

Morgan was imprisoned at La Cabaña while awaiting trial. He spent much of his time trying to break free. He studied the design of La Cabaña and the routine of the guards, looking for a flaw in the system. “Morgan had all kinds of escape plots,” another prisoner later told the CIA.³⁷ Morgan worked to regain his strength. A press attaché at the US Embassy later wrote, “Up at dawn, he would put himself through calisthenics, then march around the compound, shouting commands at himself.” ³⁸ An inmate who had given Morgan painkillers recalled, “He exercised like an athlete and marched like a soldier.” Morgan turned increasingly toward his Catholic faith. He wore a rosary and often prayed.

Hiram González, a twenty-four-year-old revolutionary who had been arrested for conspiring against the regime, had just arrived at La Cabaña, and watched in despair as prisoners were taken out and killed by firing squads, while birds swooped down to “peck at the bits of bone, blood, and flesh.”³⁹ Morgan, he recalls, tried to cheer him up, offering his mattress. When Morgan found him crying in a corner, he went to him and said, “Chico, men don't cry.” Gonzalez replied, “At times like this, I'm not a man.” Morgan put his hand on his shoulder. “If it helps your suffering, then it's OK.” Morgan walked him around the prison yard until he felt better. “He was the only one to help,” González recalls.

Two days later, on March 9, 1961, guards seized Morgan and escorted him across the compound to a room where a military tribunal was being held. Along the way, Morgan, trying to summon courage, murmured song lyrics to himself: “Over hill, over dale, we have hit the dusty trail / And those caissons go rolling along.”⁴⁰

There were eleven other defendants at the tribunal, including some tried in absentia. A few weeks earlier, Che Guevara had published an essay denouncing members of the Second Front. “Revolutions, accelerated radical social changes, are made of circumstances,” he wrote.41 “They are made of passions, of man's fight for social vindication, and are never perfect.” The mistake of the Cuban Revolution, Guevara argued, was its accommodation of men like the Second Front commanders. “By their presence, they showed us our sin—the sin of compromise…in the face of the actual or potential traitor, in the face of those weak in spirit, in the face of the coward.” He went on, “Revolutionary conduct is the mirror of revolutionary faith, and when someone calls himself a revolutionary and does not act as one, he can be nothing more than heretical. Let them hang together.”

At the trial, Morgan was charged with conspiracy and treason. Later, Fabian Escalante, who served for many years as the head of Cuban counterintelligence, detailed the case against Morgan, claiming that he had been a longtime American intelligence operative—a “chameleon”—who, in 1960, had attempted to “organize, for the CIA, a band of counterrevolutionaries in the Escambray.”⁴²

At the tribunal, Morgan complained that his lawyer had only just learned of the charges against him. A prisoner who shared his imprisonment with Morgan recalled, “The whole prison was agog with the news that Morgan was actually going to stand trial. Not even the most zealous of the young rebels believed that Fidel Castro would shoot this man, who had played such a big role in the Cuban Revolution.”⁴³

Morgan denied that he had ever been a foreign agent and said, “I have defended this revolution because I believed in it.”⁴⁴ He explained, “If I am found guilty, I will walk to the execution wall with no escort, with moral strength, and with a clear conscience.”

The trial lasted little more than a day. A defendant's fate was usually signaled by which room he was taken to before the verdict. “If you went to the right, you went into a copiea, a little chapel-like room, and you knew you were going to get shot,” a prisoner recalled.⁴⁵ “For most prisoners, if you went to the left, you got thirty years.” Most of the defendants were led to the left. Morgan was led to the right and condemned to die the next day. An American radio broadcaster at the trial told his listeners that he had witnessed “a farce.”46

On the night of March 13, 1961, as Fidel clinked glasses at a reception in the new Chinese Embassy, Morgan was marched to a wall in the Moat of Laurels in La Cabaña Fortress and shot.

As a footnote to history, Morgan's Cuban wife, Olga Maria Rodriguez Farinas, was also a revolutionary. She was tried with him in absentia, found guilty of co-conspiracy, and sentenced to thirty years in prison. Rodriguez was released after twelve years, and she left for the United States during the Mariel boatlift. In a series of interviews with the Toledo Blade in 2002, she admitted that she and her husband had begun running guns to anti-Castro guerrillas because he was disenchanted by Castro's pro-Soviet leanings. She also said she wanted Morgan's US citizenship restored and his remains returned to the United States for reburial. The newspaper stories prompted two Democratic members of the United States House of Representatives, Charlie Rangel and Marcy Kaptur, to travel to Cuba in April 2002 to meet Fidel Castro and ask him to return Morgan's body. Castro agreed.

In April 2007, the US State Department declared that Morgan's US citizenship was effectively restored, nearly fifty years after the government stripped him of his rights in 1959 for serving in a foreign country's military.

According to the extensive New Yorker profile from writer David Grann, Morgan was only the second non-Cuban to earn the title of Comandante—the other being Che Guevara. As reported by the Hollywood Reporter, George Clooney and his producing partner, Grant Heslov, have optioned the article, “The Yankee Comandante,” to produce as a directorial project for Clooney.⁴⁷ It will make an interesting movie because Morgan was a complicated figure—one in the middle of three governments, trying to stay alive during brutal fighting, though fatally flawed by his ambitions.