Corpses in the closet:Posing some theories
By Manuel Alberto Ramy
A man or a woman (it matters not who) walks into a building, opens a cabinet or a closet (it matters not what), and a rotting corpse falls out. That's a scene seen in innumerable movies. Right now, we're a few hours away from seeing how many cadavers fall on the American public, not to mention how many violations were committed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
By Manuel Alberto Ramy
A man or a woman (it matters not who) walks into a building, opens a cabinet or a closet (it matters not what), and a rotting corpse falls out. That's a scene seen in innumerable movies. Right now, we're a few hours away from seeing how many cadavers fall on the American public, not to mention how many violations were committed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
News reports say that the CIA has decided to declassify 693 pages from its archives, covering a period between the 1950s and the 1970s. Despite the heated international relations, the period was known as the Cold War, maybe because of the corpses kept in cold storage, and other details such as domestic espionage, the surveillance and control of some journalists, wiretapping, etc.
Referring to the forthcoming unveiling, Gen. Michael Hayden, current director of Central Intelligence, said that "most of it is unflattering, but it is the CIA's history." (El Nuevo Herald, June 23, 2007.)
The pages were compiled by William Colby, who for a long time was the Agency's deputy director for operations and became director of Central Intelligence in May 1973.
Some of those pages were obtained last week by the National Security Archive, an independent institution based in Washington. I quote from these, with the assistance of a good friend and exceptional researcher.
A memorandum for the record written by James Wilderotter, Associate Deputy Attorney General, dated Jan. 3, 1975, gives 16 examples of illegal activities in which the CIA participated. Among them:
“(11) The CIA apparently ‘plotted’ the assassination of some foreign leaders, including [Fidel] Castro, Lumumba, and Trujillo. The CIA had no role whatsoever in Lumumba's murder on Jan. 17, 1961. With respect to Trujillo's assassination on May 30, 1961, the CIA had ‘no active part’ but had a ‘faint connection’ with the groups that in fact did it.” [Emphasis mine.]
Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, dictator of the Dominican Republic, was gunned down in an ambush in San Cristóbal. Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Congo, was killed after being arrested by order of the Congo's President, Joseph Kasavubu.
Yet, in another document — a memorandum of a conversation between Colby and President Gerald Ford on Jan. 3, 1975 — the CIA director confesses the following to Ford:
"Colby: We have run operations to assassinate foreign leaders. We have never succeeded. (He cited Castro, Trujillo, General Sneider [cq] of Chile, et al.)”
Gen. René Schneider Chereau, the Chilean Army's commander in chief, was shot dead during an ambush in Santiago, Chile, on Oct. 22, 1970.
In another memorandum for the record — this time a transcription of a conversation between President Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger on Jan. 4, 1975 — Kissinger warns Ford that it would be a mistake to admit the CIA's secret activities.
“Kissinger: [Richard] Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.”
Helms was CIA director from 1966 to 1973. Robert F. Kennedy, brother of President John F. Kennedy, was U.S. Attorney General from 1961 to 1964 and organized against the Cuban government the so-called Operation Mongoose, intended to set up domestic conditions in Cuba for an intervention by U.S. armed forces. That operation included the assassination of Cuba's leaders.
The declassification of these documents will provide material for headlines and commentaries by specialists. More important, it will generate theories very likely to be accurate and will confirm repeated denunciations, such as the ones made by Fidel Castro, who on June 17 wrote: "For many years, I was able to survive — by luck — the empire's killing machine." The convalescing leader of the Cuban process is probably the chief of state targeted for assassination more times than anyone else in world history.
As to theories, we'd have to go, for example, to the murder of Chilean Army Commander Gen. René Schneider in midtown Santiago. Schneider was an officer who respected constitutionality and had refused to join putschist plans to overthrow the government of President Salvador Allende. He was an obstacle on the road, and his death would permit a hierarchical succession more favorable to the plans stoked from Washington by the then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Only a few documents from those plans have been declassified so far.
This theory can be expanded to the presence of some Cuban-American extremists who were involved in the anti-Constitutional coup in Chile and later were identified in numerous books and articles as agents and hired assassins during Operation Condor, a campaign of death sponsored by dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Part of that operation was carried out in Washington, when Michael Townley and two Cuban-Americans — Dionisio Suárez and Virgilio Paz (who later served 12-year prison terms) — exploded a bomb that killed former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American secretary, Ronnie Moffit.
The question we should ask ourselves is: Why does the CIA, on its own, open the closet door at this point in time?
As I wrote earlier, the documents are part of the so-called Cold War. Could their release be a way to protect the surviving operatives from that period? More specifically, are we witnessing a whitewash to benefit Luis Posada Carriles, a participant in several assassination plans against Fidel Castro and a man very involved — along with Orlando Bosch and other Cuban-Americans — in Operation Condor?
It's as if the CIA said: "These events were part of another specific moment in history, marked by the East-West confrontation, and that's it. Case closed." So, what about the bombs in Havana in September 1997? Or what about the plans to blow up Castro in Panama in 2000? Or the plans to shoot him on Margarita Island in the late 1990s? Are we looking at another "faint connection" between the CIA and the plotters? Or did everything stop with Bobby Kennedy?
A remarkable coincidence arises. Cuban-born Antonio Veciana Blanch was a CIA operative inside and outside Cuba; he worked under cover in Latin America and participated in at least two assassination attempts against Castro, one of them in Chile. Both attempts were almost successful. Well, Veciana has always been reluctant to interviews; yet, last week, he appeared twice on the Miami radio program "The Night Moves" on 1210 AM and answered questions from the host.
Ninety percent of his answers confirmed the statements made to the Cuban press by retired Gen. Fabián Escalante Font, former chief of Cuban intelligence, regarding the links between Cuban operatives and the CIA.
Why now? Is this an isolated case or is it part — along with the declassification of CIA documents — of a ploy intended to grant absolution to past events and save Posada and others?
The absolved
Luis Posada Carriles is living in Miami, practically free. Orlando Bosch, who carried false passports and phony identities courtesy of DINA (the late Pinochet's intelligence service), lives quietly in Miami, too. It is odd that, despite rulings by the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI that banned his presence from U.S. soil, former President George H. W. Bush in 1990 granted him residency in this country with a presidential pardon.
Messrs. Santiago Álvarez and Osvaldo Mitat, who in late 2005 were found to have an arsenal of weapons, were recently tried and given four and three years' imprisonment. But because they later surrendered an additional arsenal, their sentences may be reduced by one or two years, which means they are practically free.
Álvarez directed an operation foiled by Cuban intelligence, one of whose objectives was to blow up the famous Tropicana nightclub. "A small can of C-4 is enough" for the purpose, he said in an intercepted telephone conversation with the terrorist he had sent, who was already in custody in Havana.
Robert Ferro, a Cuban-American living in California, symbolizes the largest seizure of weapons from a civilian in the history of the United States: 1,571 firearms of various calibers, including machine guns, grenades and other artifacts. Through an act of legal legerdemain, the seven initial charges were reduced to only one, and the number of seized weapons was set at 17. Apparently, the rest are museum pieces.
One way or another, all these gentlemen threatened to loosen their tongues and spill out their official (and unofficial) commitments — especially the latter. The explanation may be found in the declassified document that says "the CIA had ‘no active part’ but had a ‘faint connection’ with the groups that in fact did it.” Or in Colby's statement: "We have run operations to assassinate foreign leaders."
To "run operations" and to maintain "a faint connection" means to facilitate means and resources, to indirectly supervise while looking in another direction in order to have "plausible deniability." That practice was initiated by Robert Kennedy, and his followers improved it qualitatively. But loose threats are always dangling, as well as deals based in "I know" and "you know that I know." There are also domestic political needs with a view to the forthcoming elections in Florida, where the rainbow of opinions has been changing perceptibly.
Is this whitewash operation being launched to seal someone's lips and stay in good terms with some operatives? Could it also be intended to strengthen and guarantee the support of the so-called "historical exile"? It could be, why not? But it also could be a trinket to pacify the "historicals" (or hystericals) in case some bad news comes their way.
At this moment, numerous factors and interests are being put into play and many deals are being reached. One theory is that Democratic and Republican legislators have agreed to support the budget for Radio-TV Martí in exchange for support for a lifting of the travel restrictions to Cuba that affect Cuban-Americans. Everything is possible.
Manuel Alberto Ramy is Havana bureau chief for Radio Progreso Alternativa and editor of Progreso Semanal, the Spanish-language version of Progreso Weekly.
