Part 3: Surprise, Kill,& Vanish...The KGB's Office of Liquid Affairs...Green Light...The Special Group

Surprise,Kill, Vanish
By Annie Jacobson
7 

The KGB's Office of Liquid Affairs

Through the 1950's, the president’s advisors continued to see the Soviets as the cause of anti-American acts and sentiment they could otherwise not explain. At the same time, Moscow remained hyper focused on controlling the public’s perception of communism. From 1954 onward, the CIA believed that the Kremlin was behind the recent spate of émigré kidnappings and assassinations in Eastern Europe. Too many community leaders who’d spoken out against the Soviet Union were winding up disappeared or dead. For the most part this was speculative. If only the CIA had hard evidence. The hit-and-run ambushes were brazen and bold, often occurring in broad daylight on city streets. Finally, in 1954, the CIA got the evidence it was looking for in the strange case of KGB assassin Captain Nikolai Evgenievich Khokhlov. 

Captain Khokhlov was a shy man, quiet and unassuming. His first career, before the Second World War, was as a theatrical performer. His special talent was whistling. Now here he was, standing in a hallway in Frankfurt, Germany, a KGB assassin on a mission to kill. It was April 1954, and everything in Khokhlov’s life was about to change. 

He rang the doorbell above a small nameplate that read GEORGIY SERGEYEVICH OKOLOVICH. Russian by birth, Okolovich was an outspoken anti-Soviet émigré and chief of operations of the Popular Labor Alliance of Russian Solidarists, a virulently anti-communist group in West Germany. The door opened. The two men stood face-to-face. 

“Georgiy Sergeyevich?” Khokhlov asked. 

“Da,” said the man, “Yes, I am he.” 

“I have come to you from Moscow,” Khokhlov stated. “The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has ordered your assassination. The murder is entrusted to my group. I cannot let this murder happen.” 

The target, Georgiy Okolovich, let the assassin, Nikolai Khokhlov, inside. Khokhlov sat down, presented his credentials, and went over the details of the plan. Then he begged for help. He couldn’t go on like this, Khokhlov said, overseeing the deaths of people the Kremlin wanted killed. Khokhlov wanted to switch sides—to betray his country and defect to the West. If Okolovich were willing to help him, they both would live. And so assassination as a secret weapon in the battle between East and West moved out of the shadows and into the public eye. 

One week later, on April 22, Captain Nikolai Evgenievich Khokhlov took to the podium at a press conference in Bonn, Germany. He announced to the world that he was an assassin for the KGB. A “crisis of conscience” had prevented him from killing, he said. The KGB was evil and had to be stopped, he warned. As proof, he revealed yet another Soviet covert-action operation that had been carried out the week before. While Khokhlov was being debriefed by U.S. intelligence agents in Bonn, a second assassination team dispatched by the KGB had succeeded in kidnapping and assassinating an anti-Soviet émigré named Aleksandr Trushinovich, Okolovich’s counterpart at the Popular Labor Alliance of Russian Solidarists in Berlin. 

At first, the CIA was suspicious of Khokhlov. His story sounded apocryphal. The more likely scenario was that Khokhlov was a double agent, a Soviet mole. But after a few days of questioning, Khokhlov’s American handler became convinced he was indeed a KGB assassin who had experienced a crisis of conscience that led to an ideological shift. In the Cold War battle between the United States and the USSR, most defecting was done from East to West, which made Russia look bad. The Soviet Union spent time and treasure trying to control the free world’s perception of communism, which is why outspoken anti-Soviet émigrés like Georgiy Okolovich and Aleksandr Trushinovich were high on the assassination list. Now so too was Khokhlov. 

Adding to the drama of his defection was the fact that he carried with him physical evidence of the Soviet-led assassination plot. The weapon the KGB had given him was a cunning little close-quarters killing machine, a poison dart gun disguised to look like a cigarette pack. At first glance, the two rows of tightly packed smokes appeared normal. But Khokhlov demonstrated how, with the press of a secret button, a four-inch-long dart gun sprang forth, capable of firing small, poison-tipped bullets into a victim. The weapon’s delivery system was no louder than a snap of the fingers, Khokhlov demonstrated, and designed to be fired in a public space without notice. 

In Khokhlov’s debrief, the CIA learned quite a bit about the unusual man, code-named Whistler, including his intelligence activities during the war. When higher-ups in the KGB’s predecessor organization, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), learned that the blond, blue-eyed Khokhlov spoke German and could whistle, they foresaw an excellent disguise for a wartime covert agent. In 1941, Khokhlov was recalled from a frontline infantry unit, indoctrinated by the NKVD, and sent for paramilitary training, where he learned assassination techniques behind enemy lines. He studied infiltration and exfiltration tactics, reconnaissance tradecraft, hand-to-hand combat skills, and the art of silent killing, training similar to OSS operators’. In the fall of 1943, Khokhlov had parachuted into Belarus under cover of night, where he linked up with Soviet partisans and oversaw the assassination of Nazi General kommissar Wilhelm Kube, the Butcher of Belarus. Khokhlov, it seemed, was the communist version of the Special Operations Executive’s Jan Kubiš and Josef Gabčík, the commandos who assassinated SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague. 

After the war, Nikolai Khokhlov went to work for Russian intelligence, posing as a German, a Pole, and a Romanian. In 1954, after the death of Stalin, the NKVD became the KGB and Khokhlov was called back to Moscow. He began to have second thoughts about being a professional assassin right around the time he was sent to Frankfurt to kill Georgiy Okolovich. 

During Khokhlov’s debrief, the CIA learned information it coveted. The KGB’s assassination unit was called the 12th Department and was “divided into sections (otdeleniye) or directions (napravlenie), by countries or groups of countries, such as, for example, the United States (‘the principal enemy’), England, Latin America, etc.” According to Khokhlov, the 12th Department headquarters in Moscow maintained fifty to sixty experienced employees and was headed by a general named Nikolai B. Rodin, who, “under the alias Korovin, had previously been the KGB resident in Great Britain.” Secrecy regarding assassination operations was maintained through careful selection of agents and the specialized training of Soviet personnel. “The officers do not discuss their experience among others; department documents are not circulated,” Khokhlov’s handlers learned. If an assassination plot were ever recorded, it would be kept track of under the code phrase Executive Action, within the KGB directorate of “liquid affairs” (mokryye dela), also known as “wet matters.” 

The 12th Department had two secret weapons laboratories whose scientists worked on weapons for Executive Action operations. One of these laboratories, code-named Laboratory No. 12, produced “special weapons and explosive devices.” It was here that the Soviets engineered and prepared deadly tools of assassination, from “drawing up blueprints [to] melting and pouring bullets.” A second lab, called Kamera, or the Chamber, “developed poisons and drugs for ‘special tasks.’” Stalin personally oversaw the creation of the Kamera lab, Khokhlov said, which was located in a suburb outside Moscow called Kuchino. The laboratory housed a torture chamber, a place where death-row prisoners were used as guinea pigs, injected with “different powders, beverages, and liquors… to test the effectiveness of various types of injections.” One high priority effort for the scientists and engineers at Kamera, Khokhlov said, was to create poisons that would be undetectable in an autopsy. Only a handful of high level persons were ever allowed to enter this classified facility. Khokhlov had never been to Kamera, he said, but knew people who had. 

All assassins were trained in the art of kidnapping, the preferred hit-and-run tactic of the 12th Department. The Russian strike-force units were called combat groups (boyevaya gruppa). Each consisted of a Soviet staff officer, like Khokhlov, augmented by a team of indigenous agents, local assets familiar with customs and terrain near where a target lived. On the mission to kill Georgiy Okolovich, Khokhlov had been assigned to work with two German-born KGB agents he identified as Hans Kukowitsch and Kurt Weber. All combat-group paramilitary operators were “armed and prepared to perform executive actions when required to do so, either in time of peace or war,” Khokhlov said. 

The list of Soviet targets for assassination was long, particularly among the anticommunist émigré community. The members of the Politburo guarded a reputation they constructed for themselves, and were determined to stamp out dissent. The best way to silence former citizens who threatened the facade was to kidnap and assassinate them. “The assassinations of some émigré leaders [are often] carried out so skillfully as to leave the impression that the victims died from natural causes,” reads a declassified CIA report. The individuals who died were reportedly “victims of an apparent heart attack, suicide, fall, or traffic accident.” Other émigré leaders were wanted for information they had. These people were targeted for kidnapping by a direct-action strike force called a Combat Action Team. The paramilitary team followed orders from the directorate of liquid affairs. 

The CIA had a thick dossier of the disappeared émigrés, to which Khokhlov added several names. There was Walter Linse, president of the Association of Free German Jurists (lawyers), kidnapped off the streets of Berlin in July of 1952 by a thirteen-man KGB Combat Action team, never to be seen again. There was Bohumil Lausman, an outspoken anticommunist Czech who disappeared from Vienna in 1953 and was later reported to have been taken to a Soviet gulag, where he died. The Ukrainian national Valeri P. Tremmel was grabbed off the streets of Linz, Austria, in June 1954, never to be seen or heard from again. 

For his high-profile defection to the West and his refusal to kill on moral grounds, Khokhlov was featured in Time magazine and Life magazine and in a four-part series in the Saturday Evening Post, “I Would Not Murder for the Soviets.” When he testified for Congress, he made the Soviet Union sound downright diabolical. He spoke of Soviet death camps, brutal police tactics, and the machine-gunning of citizens who’d gathered to resist totalitarian rule. Under oath, he swore that while “members of the elite enjoy very good living conditions, the ordinary man in the Soviet Union is treated as a slave.” 

Embraced by the United States, Khokhlov soon became the target of the KGB. To assassinate their former assassin, the KGB ordered scientists in the 12th Department, now renamed the 13th Department, to develop a special toxin undetectable in an autopsy. They wanted a poison that would first disfigure him, then bring about a long, slow, excruciatingly painful death. Not as much for revenge but to send a clear message to anyone who might be thinking about betraying Russia. Three years passed. 

In 1958, Khokhlov traveled to Germany to give a speech at a convention of anti-communist émigrés gathered at the Palmengarten conservatory in Frankfurt. During a break, he was sitting at a terrace café enjoying a cup of coffee when he became light-headed. There weren’t many people around, he recalled, just a few beer drinkers. Sipping the coffee, he suddenly thought that it tasted funny. Never mind, he thought, and got up and went into the conservatory’s concert hall to enjoy the opera being performed. His ears started ringing. He felt nauseated. His vision blurred. “Things began to whirl,” he later told the CIA. Khokhlov staggered out to the parking lot, found the car he was driving, and somehow made it back to his hotel, stopping to vomit several times along the way. In the hotel foyer he collapsed and lost consciousness. Taken to Frankfurt University Hospital, he awoke to learn he’d been diagnosed with a basic case of gastritis. 

But his condition quickly worsened, and worsened. Soon, his entire body turned a copper-colored red. “My mind began disintegrating,” he recalled. He could not accurately determine if he was dreaming or awake. He lost the ability to count beyond ten. Days passed. A nurse came into the room, looked at him, and froze. Then she screamed and ran out. Looking in the mirror, Khokhlov saw that he was covered in black-and-blue marks. Patches of his skin were mottled brown. His pillowcase was covered in blood. “My face had turned into a mask reminiscent of [a] Boris Karloff monster,” he remembered. When he reached up to touch his hair, huge tufts fell out. 

In Washington, DC, the Pentagon received word of what had happened to Nikolai Khokhlov. The Defense Department swung into action, sending American military physicians to bring Khokhlov under their care. His white blood cell count had fallen from the normal level of 6,000–7,000 down to 700. Doctors took a bone marrow sample. His blood-building cells were dying off. The test samples came back: he’d been poisoned by some kind of radioactive isotope. Doctors gave him very little chance of recovery. Then, after a week of blood transfusions, Khokhlov somewhat miraculously recovered. 

It was the CIA that concluded that Khokhlov had been poisoned with radioactive thallium, a deadly toxin, likely created by Soviet scientists in their Kamera lab. The poison had been engineered to work in a “diabolically clever” fashion, an analyst wrote, designed to produce an initial display of symptoms doctors would almost certainly misdiagnose as generic gastritis. The assassins, assumed to be from the KGB’s directorate of liquid affairs, had probably posed as waiters at the Palmengarten conservatory terrace café, where one of them had slipped a few drops of radioactive thallium into Khokhlov’s coffee cup. 

Just one week after Nikolai Khokhlov was released from the American military hospital in Frankfurt, the directorate of liquid affairs struck again. This time they succeeded in poisoning a high-profile anticommunist Ukrainian politician named Lev Rebet, killing him. The assassination occurred in Munich, Germany, in the stairwell of a newspaper office where Rebet had been working with a reporter to expose Kremlin-sponsored assassinations. In World War II, Rebet was the leader of the Ukrainian government until he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941. He’d survived imprisonment at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, only to be killed by a KGB assassin with a poison dart gun in an office building stairwell. 

Initially, Lev Rebet’s death was reported as being from natural causes. The autopsy that followed his collapse in the stairwell stated the cause of death as a heart attack. But four years later, in 1961, a second KGB assassin, Bohdan Stashinsky, defected to Berlin, surrendering himself to West German authorities who turned him over to the CIA. At a U.S. facility in Frankfurt, Stashinsky spent weeks in the custody of the CIA, interrogated by an officer named William Hood. Stashinsky told Hood that he was assigned to the directorate of liquid affairs and that he’d assassinated Lev Rebet with a specially crafted poison gun, a tiny weapon with which he’d sprayed atomized hydrogen cyanide directly into Rebet’s face. He described watching Rebet crumple over and die right in front of him. 

Unlike Nikolai Khokhlov, Bohdan Stashinsky did not experience a crisis of conscience. He was a double agent. In 2011, at the age of eighty, he revealed in an interview with Ukrainian journalist Natalya Prykhodko that he was always a committed communist and had been sent by the Kremlin to turn himself in, win the good graces of the CIA, and continue his work as a Soviet mole. 

Bohdan Stashinsky served eight years in a German prison for the murder of Lev Rebet. This light sentence was likely a result of the lie he propagated—that he couldn’t bear to be an assassin and instead turned himself in. After Stashinsky’s release in 1966, he went to Washington to work with the CIA. But “they suspected a double game,” he says, and he was sent to a backwater post in Panama. After a few years with no access to anything important, Stashinsky was “extracted and transported to Paraguay” by the KGB. He went to Africa, had plastic surgery (so the CIA couldn’t find him), and returned to the USSR in 1970. The CIA’s files on Bohdan Stashinsky remain classified. 

In Moscow, the KGB opened two new divisions inside its directorate of liquid affairs. Department T (for “terrorism”) oversaw assassinations by “shooting, poisoning, blowing [things] up and subversion.” Department V (for “victory”) kept track of its assassins’ successes. The new name for work being done by Department T was now “direct action,” declassified CIA documents reveal .

8 

Green Light

It was the fall of 1960, and Billy Waugh stood in the open air, on the inky black sea, near the jack staff of the nuclear attack submarine USS Grayback. As the sub slid through the water off the east coast of Okinawa Island in the Pacific, Waugh and three team members prepared for a Top Secret wet-deck launch—a subsurface infiltration technique mastered by a small, elite group of U.S. Special Forces operators called a Green Light Team. The training mission was to em-place a tactical nuclear weapon into the target area, arm the device, and ex-filtrate without detection. The submarine’s motto, De Profundis Futurus, was indicative of these perilous Cold War times. Here now, in the last year of the Eisenhower administration, if the United States went to war, the battle cry would likely be nuclear. 

“It was an atomic weapon we were carrying,” remembers Waugh. “Not a mock-up. The army had us train with an actual nuclear device. We had to be battle-ready, and we were.” The tactical nuclear weapon Waugh and his teammates were carrying was a W 54 Special Atomic Demolition Munition, or SADM. It weighed ninety-eight pounds and had a projected yield of between one and seven kilotons. This weapon was designed to be carried on a man’s back or chest, or in pieces, to be assembled on the battlefield. Built by Sandia laboratory in New Mexico, the portable atomic weapon was capable of entirely destroying an area roughly one mile in diameter. “Few humans, buildings [or] structures in the kill radius” would survive, according to material declassified by the Department of Defense. Green Light operators who trained with an actual SADM device—who parachuted with it, and swam with it strapped to their bodies—understood the profound responsibility. The blast from a one-kiloton atomic weapon was equivalent to 20,000 pounds of TNT. But as Green Berets, Waugh and the men he was with had been trained to operate under extraordinary pressure, entrusted to handle a device capable of death and destruction on an unimaginable scale, whose power was contained inside a small aluminum vessel the size of a kitchen garbage can.

Waugh strapped the components of the heavy and cumbersome nuclear weapon to his chest. “As team leader, I carried two of the four plutonium rings,” he remembered in 2016. “Two of the other team members each carried a single ring.” The rings were attached to his body with cloth ties and secured with metal clips. Waugh pulled his infrared device for night viewing down over his eyes, scanned the surface of the water, and climbed down off the submarine’s stanchion. Skillfully, as trained, he lowered himself into the 15-man rubber boat (RB-15) and assumed position. Were the inflatable boat to strike the jackstaff, it could mean disaster. If the RB-15 flipped, the submarine’s powerful propellers would likely suck the Green Light Team members into its wake. But the four men on Waugh’s team boarded the boat without incident, and the submarine sunk down below the surface and disappeared. “We paddled four hundred meters to shore. Quiet. Silent. No motor, no sound,” recalls Waugh.

Once on the shore, the Green Light Team deflated the rubber boat, buried it, and covered their tracks with sand and foliage. “We walked to the target area. Once we got there, we assembled the device, set the timer for four hours, and armed it. It took two of us to do it. That was the fail-safe.” No single team member could arm the nuclear device alone. “When it was time to ex-filtrate, we started walking out. Used commo to relay our position.” The effort to communicate was successful, and finally the team was picked up by helicopter and taken back to base. “To Camp Hardy,” says Waugh, “for a debrief.” Camp Hardy was a U.S. military installation on the northeast coast of Okinawa, halfway between the villages of Higashi and Arakawa. That Top Secret Green Light Team atomic weapons training missions took place here, starting in 1960, has never been officially acknowledged by the Department of Defense. 

Strategically located 910 miles from Tokyo, Japan, Okinawa had a blood soaked history. In the spring of 1945, a final showdown between the United States and Japan took place here, the last stepping-stone before the mainland. More than 140,000 people died on Okinawa between April and June 1945, in the largest sea-air-land battle of World War II. More than 12,000 Americans were killed and 36,000 wounded. By June 22, when the fighting ended, 110,000 Japanese soldiers had been killed, and 160,000 Okinawan civilians had been sacrificed by the Japanese Army or killed by U.S. military personnel.

After the Japanese surrender, Okinawa became a protectorate of the United States, technically no longer part of Japan. The U.S. military constructed bases for its army, air force, and navy here, including at Naha and Kadena, and Torii Station. In 1950, with the outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula, Okinawa became a strategic foothold for U.S. military and intelligence operations in Asia, a place from which the army and navy launched conventional-force operations. But the need for unconventional-warfare bases was now expanding, for classified units like the Green Light Teams and others. In June 1957, the U.S. Army activated the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) on Okinawa, tasked with the responsibility for Pacific theater guerrilla warfare operations. As for Billy Waugh, after being singled out for parachute and weapons handling skills back at Fort Bragg, he’d been sent to Okinawa as a member of Company A, 1st Special Forces Group, for live-action SADM training.

The role of a Green Light Team was to carry a nuclear device into battle, behind enemy lines, where it could be used as a tactical weapon. SADM was designed for sabotage: to blow up fortified enemy infrastructure, including tunnels, viaducts, and mountain passes. The small nuclear weapon could also be placed just inside the enemy’s front line and detonated there. In addition to killing significant numbers of enemy soldiers, a nuclear explosion near the main line of defense would force an army to spend precious resources caring for what would likely be tens of thousands of mortally wounded soldiers, casualties of small-scale atomic warfare.

To be selected for a Green Light Team was a rare and private honor. Team members worked under pseudonyms and wore fatigues with no military markings or insignia. “The unit was classified, and you didn’t go around discussing it or talking about it at the mess hall,” says Waugh. Being chosen meant you’d demonstrated an ability to perform flawlessly, with laser focus under great stress. Flexible and rigorous in equal measure. Initial training was at the U.S. Army Engineer Center at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia, where Green Light Team members learned infiltration techniques including parachute drops onto land, wet-deck launches from subs, and a combination of parachute drops into the ocean accompanied by underwater infiltration's, in scuba gear.

To parachute a tactical nuclear weapon out of an aircraft required meticulous attention to detail. “Timing was everything,” remembers Waugh. “You all had to jump quickly—you couldn’t afford to be spread out when you landed on the ground.” The disassembled device was placed into a breakaway bag made of canvas, sealed with a heavy rubber band, and attached to the team leader’s parachute harness. A jumper’s rigging was engineered in a way that once out of the aircraft, the nuclear component would fall to the end of a seventeen-foot lowering line. According to declassified Defense Department material, “By separating the munition from the jumper, the impact shock on water entry would be decreased. It also keeps the weapon from free-falling and prevents loss in night missions or heavy seas.” But accidents happened, as Waugh recalls. “A Green Light crew on Okinawa lost a nuclear device. It slipped out of its harness and fell into the mud on the sea floor. Every asset in the U.S. Navy was involved in finding the missing SADM. Eventually we found it. These kinds of mishaps are always resolved.” The Defense Department has never confirmed the incident.

The nuclear weapons work of the Top Secret Green Light Teams on Okinawa was a product of President Eisenhower’s limited nuclear war doctrine, officially called the New Look. The concept of a limited nuclear war was a paradox, a seeming contradiction of Eisenhower’s military doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD.

Mutual Assured Destruction presumed that opposing sides would each build an arsenal of nuclear weapons so massive, the capability alone would serve as a deterrent, or disincentive, for ever starting a nuclear war. Neither side would be crazy enough to launch a nuclear strike against the other side, the theory went, because all-out nuclear warfare guaranteed complete annihilation of both sides.

But what about smaller wars? So-called limited nuclear wars? To satisfy this question, Eisenhower’s National Security Council created the New Look limited war strategy, which gave birth to thousands of tactical nuclear weapons in the late 1950's and early 1960's, including the SADM. These small-sized nuclear weapons were designed for actual use on the battlefield, not for deterrence. Nuclear weapons were miniaturized, to fit into artillery shells, surface-to-air missiles, air-to-air missiles, short-range missiles, as truck-portable weapons, man-portable weapons, as atomic land mines and depth charges. But the very possibility of limited nuclear war presented an obvious problem. It was like asking a dying man to fight with a butter knife when there’s an ice pick within reach. 

“The way to deter aggression is for [America] to be willing and able to respond vigorously at any place and with means of its own choosing,” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told the Council on Foreign Relations in January 1954, in his first public speech promoting the use of strategic nuclear weapons to win small wars directed by Moscow. These atomic munitions could be used “in the Arctic and in the Tropics; in Asia, the Near East, and in Europe; by sea, by land and by air,” Dulles warned. With this New Look doctrine in play, the United States promised it could, and if it wanted to would, respond to a conventional threat anywhere in the world with a precision nuclear strike.

But just four months after Dulles’s 1954 speech, its hollow bluster became clear, in the tiny Southeast Asian country of Vietnam. There, on a small mountain outpost on the Vietnamese border near Laos, a ferociously fought battle came to a brutal climax, stunning the world. The event, now long forgotten by most, was the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, a fifty-seven-day armed conflict between the communists of North Vietnam and the far more technologically advanced French Union Army and its air force. It is one of the most significant unconventional-warfare battles of the modern era.

At Dien Bien Phu, 42,000 guerrilla fighters, aided by more than 114,000 Vietnamese civilians, put a decisive end to one hundred years of French colonial rule. The success of the battle belonged in arguably to two men: the group’s charismatic leader, Ho Chi Minh, and the general of his army, Vo Nguyen Giap. Just nine years earlier, during World War II, these two men had been trained by an OSS Special Operations team to fight Japanese invaders inside Vietnam. Called the OSS Deer Team, the unit was the Vietnamese equivalent of the French Jedburghs. In September 1945, Colonel Aaron Bank, leader of one of these teams, spent a day personally driving around Vietnam with Ho Chi Minh after Bank’s OSS car broke down.

In the modern history of unconventional warfare, General Giap’s battle tactics at Dien Bien Phu remain remarkable. In addition to the guerrilla fighters, trained in tactics taught to General Giap by the OSS Dear Team, the 114,000 civilians who showed up proved invaluable to the cause. Men and women of all ages and abilities walked to the remote mountain outpost of Dien Bien Phu from across North Vietnam, transporting supplies and heavy weapons from hundreds of miles away. Among the weapons hauled through the treacherous terrain were roughly 500 American-made howitzers, left behind by U.S. forces in Korea and appropriated by the Chinese.

To get to Dien Bien Phu, General Giap’s army of civilians built roadways and footpaths through deep mud, dense jungle, and mountainous terrain with shovels carried on their backs. Once they reached the battle area, they hand-dug a trench around the 14,000 French forces holding ground there. Ho and Giap’s revolutionaries set up their Soviet- and Chinese-made antiaircraft guns they’d pulled up the mountain, using ropes. They used these gifts of their communist benefactors to fire at French fighter-bombers, shooting down scores and making resupply impossible. Entrenched and surrounded, the French lost the ability to fight. On May 7, 1954, after a nearly two-month-long siege, French forces surrendered. Some 1,600 French troops were dead, 5,000 wounded, 1,600 missing. Over 8,000 French soldiers were captured by the communists, called Viet Minh, and marched off to prison camps, some as far as 500 miles away. Fewer than half of these POW's survived. 

In the final days of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the United States did not come to the aid of its ally, France. In the aftermath of the French capitulation, President Eisenhower was forced to consider anew the national-security challenge that was Vietnam. A delegation of U.S., French, British, Soviet, and Chinese diplomats met in Switzerland and agreed to divide Vietnam into North and South, as had been done in Korea at the end of World War II. Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh were given control of the north. Emperor Bao Dai and a new prime minister named Ngo Dinh Diem were assigned control in the south.

The situation was the best the United States could hope for in Vietnam in 1954. In a classified memorandum to the president, CIA director Allen Dulles relayed a simple truth. “The evidence [shows] that a majority of people in Vietnam supported the Viet Minh rebels,” Dulles wrote. “The victory in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu has tremendously boosted Ho’s popularity.” And right behind Ho in popularity was General Giap. 

In the North, in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh made General Giap his vice premier and defense minister, and the commander in chief of the Vietnam People’s Army. General Giap wrote a handbook on guerrilla warfare, People’s War, People’s Army, which was aggressively studied within the CIA. “Giap shares with Premier Khrushchev a conviction that the future holds many ‘just wars of national liberation,’” one analyst wrote. Giap’s book provided guidance for regular citizens who wanted to join the underground movement and participate in sabotage and subversion against the south. “Guerrilla war must multiply,” wrote Giap. It was time for the movement to “develop into mobile warfare,” he commanded, “to wear out and annihilate bigger enemy forces and win ever greater victories.” At the CIA, plans for covert-action operations against Ho Chi Minh and General Giap moved to the fore.

In an effort to diminish Ho and Giap’s rising popularity, and to bolster Emperor Bao Dai and Prime Minister Diem, the CIA established a secret presence in Saigon, in the south. With clandestine offices tucked away inside the U.S. Embassy there, the CIA dispatched a retired air force colonel named Edward Lansdale to serve as chief of covert operations. Within weeks of his arrival Lansdale reported back to DC, describing the situation in Saigon as chaotic and ungovernable. Bandits and roving gangs controlled the streets. A criminal gang called Binh Xuyen held power over the riverboats. Animist-based religious sects, including the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai, sold protection against violence and crime in the form of trinkets and magic spells. But Lansdale believed America could work with President Diem, he told his superiors. Diem was an avowed anticommunist, and espoused admiration for everything the West represented. Diem dressed like a British dilettante and spoke fluent English, having studied Catholicism at a Maryknoll seminary in New Jersey for almost a year. He seemed easy enough to control. 

Using CIA cash, Colonel Lansdale paid off the criminal gangs to cease and desist, then bribed Diem’s opposition leaders to step down. In 1955, also with CIA funds, he helped rig an election that got rid of the increasingly unpopular and corrupt Emperor Bao Dai. Lansdale encouraged Diem to unify the disparate groups of people who populated South Vietnam, including the urban elite, the rural peasants, and the tribal hill people. This was what the communists were doing up North, through heavy-handed, Soviet-style coercion. But the North was unified, Lansdale told Diem, and without unification, the communists would be more likely to succeed in dividing and conquering the south with their mobile guerrilla warfare plans. Declassified documents from CIA archives indicate Lansdale tried repeatedly to get Prime Minister Diem to unify and strengthen civil society through education and infrastructure programs for people in the south, ones the CIA was ready and willing to pay for. But Diem would have none of it. President Eisenhower had called him the “miracle man in Asia” during Diem’s visit to America, and apparently Diem thought that made him invincible. He was wrong. 

Lansdale began working on covert actions that did not require Diem’s cooperation. Operation Passage to Freedom, disguised as a humanitarian effort by the U.S. Navy, was a covert-action operation run by the CIA. Under the catchy slogan “God Has Gone South,” the effort drew the world’s attention to the plight of religious Vietnamese being persecuted by God-hating communists. With help from the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the CIA engineered the exodus of 1.25 million Vietnamese Catholics from the north to the south. “U.S. officials wanted to make sure that as many persons as possible, particularly the strongly anticommunist Catholics, relocated in the south,” Lansdale later recalled.

But how to get people to uproot their families and move hundreds of miles? Lansdale, a master of propaganda, devised a plan. He had CIA artists create pamphlets showing Hanoi with three nuclear mushroom clouds superimposed on a map. He infiltrated CIA assets into the North to spread rumors of a possible U.S. nuclear strike against Hanoi. The way to avoid death by nuclear holocaust was to move south. The public remained naive as to Lansdale’s efforts, and the campaign was a success, lauded by the international press. But it damaged Ho Chi Minh’s reputation as a liberator, at least temporarily. And it infuriated the Politburo, which fired back with a brutal covert-action assassination campaign against South Vietnam.

Ho Chi Minh and General Giap did not have a powerful navy at their disposal, but what they did have were assassins. Starting in 1959, they began developing an entire mobile warfare army of singleton killers—men and women willing to travel south and assassinate pro-Western South Vietnamese officials, teachers, policemen, and intellectuals. By the time the CIA was wrapping up Operation Passage to Freedom, hundreds of Hanoi’s assassins had been emplaced below the 17th parallel. Aided by a partisan support network of communist sympathizers in the south, these groups, called special activity cells, were trained by a security operations officer named Nguyen Tai. Nguyen Tai’s story did not become public until 1990, after his memoirs were published in Hanoi. He served in the Ministry of Public Security, North Vietnam’s espionage and security organization modeled after the KGB. “His father, Nguyen Cong Hoan, was one of Vietnam’s most famous authors,” says former CIA operations officer Merle L. Pribbenow. Tai’s rise to power came after he helped the government build a case against his own father for “anti-regime statements.” To betray one’s family in the name of the communist party was rewarded as loyalty. 

In 1959, assassins trained by Nguyen Tai and his Security Operations Officers succeeded in the hit-and-run killings of more than 1,200 South Vietnamese officials. The assassins would run up to a target, point a pistol at the person’s head, pull the trigger, and disappear. The ease with which the assassins were able to strike, then vanish, bred paranoia, chaos, and fear. The following year, in 1960, the number of close-contact assassinations more than doubled, with upward of 3,500 district officials, rural police, village chiefs, local teachers, and others murdered in the south. “This covert war was a difficult, dirty, no holds-barred struggle that employed assassination and terror as its stock-in trade,” says Pribbenow.

Eisenhower was in an untenable position. Diplomacy was out of the question and military action was deemed unwise. The president’s third option in South Vietnam, covert action, was having little effect. The president’s advisors suggested Eisenhower take action in Vietnam’s neighbor to the west, the kingdom of Laos, where a new communist insurgency was beginning to take hold. These guerrilla fighters, who were allied with Ho Chi Minh’s forces in North Vietnam, were called the Pathet Lao. The result was a CIA-led covert action program in Laos, first called Operation Ambidextrous, renamed Operation Hot Foot, and finally known as Operation White Star. The man in charge was Colonel Arthur D. “Bull” Simons, a hard-charging unconventional-warfare specialist from World War II operations in the Philippines. 

CIA officers and U.S. Army Green Berets disguised as land surveyors with the National Geodetic Survey association were sent to Laos to train Royal Lao soldiers in unconventional-warfare techniques. The 107 Green Berets who participated in the operation were assigned to units called Mobile Training Teams. One of these operators was Billy Waugh.

One morning during SADM training on Okinawa Island, Waugh received his unusual orders. His papers stated that he was going on a six-month Temporary Duty Assignment (TDY) to Vietnam, when in fact he was going to Laos as a member of Operation White Star. Waugh and a twelve-man Special Forces ATeam traveled from Okinawa to the Philippines, to Bangkok, and then to Vientiane, Laos. From there, the A-Team took army vehicles to Pakse, Laos, located in the western part of the country near its border with Thailand. The Green Berets wore civilian clothing and carried Defense Department civilian identification cards. When the White Star team arrived at what would be their training center for the next six months, they found nothing but an isolated village of thatched huts. Everything the Green Berets needed to set up training operations was air-dropped in from Okinawa—food, weapons, construction materials, even two trucks and a bulldozer.

Laos was an impoverished country living in a preindustrial age. When Waugh first arrived there, the landlocked nation didn’t have a single paved road, railroad, or newspaper. Its estimated two million people were more likely to identify themselves as Hmong and Meo tribesmen than as citizens of Laos. “Most of the [White Star] trainees were illiterate, and many did not know that Laos was an independent nation or that it possessed a standing army,” says Defense Department command historian Ken Finlayson. “White Star advisors faced an almost insurmountable task in trying to instill a sense of urgency and purpose in the Laotian soldiers, to implement rigid training schedules,” and to prepare them for battle with the Pathet Lao.

The intention of White Star was to train Laotian troops to a level of competence that would enable them to fight the communist Pathet Lao. This proved to be a daunting task, if not an impossible one. “The Laotian commander of our unit drank a lot and drove his Mercedes around,” remembers Waugh. “The concept of discipline or physical training did not exist.” White Star advisor Colonel Alfred Paddock recalls that “an astonishing fifteen soldiers were killed by their own mines during our stay.” How to train a rebel army in the developing world in keeping with U.S. Army standards? The same conundrum has plagued the U.S. Army from World War II to the present day.

But there was a far more dangerous problem unfolding, one that neither the CIA nor the Defense Department foresaw. Hanoi was using Laos as a supply route, a way to move weapons, fighters, and supplies from North Vietnam into South Vietnam. This passageway would become known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It consisted of more than 1,500 miles of interconnected pathways and roads, some wide and sturdy enough for trucks, others meant for elephants, foot soldiers, and bicyclists. A Top Secret National Security Agency (NSA) report declassified in 2007 called the Ho Chi Minh Trail “one of the great achievements in military engineering of the twentieth century.” Thanks to the triple-canopy jungle that stretched across much of Laos and Vietnam, the construction of the trail was happening right under the CIA’s nose.

It was a communist-led covert-action operation of epic proportions— viciously effective and so easy to plausibly deny. Historians agree: the Ho Chi Minh Trail was a primary factor in America’s losing the Vietnam War.

9

The Special Group

During the last year of Eisenhower’s presidency, in a radical escalation of hidden-hand operations, a small group of the president’s principal advisors began openly discussing among themselves plans to assassinate foreign leaders. This new group was called the Special Group.  

It was not uncommon for the president’s covert-action advisory board to change names. The National Security Council remained the official oversight board, and smaller ancillary groups were often created to deal with the most incendiary and potentially scandalous covert operations. First there was the Psychological Strategy Board, formed in 1951, as we have seen. During the Guatemala coup d’état, in 1953, the PSB was reorganized as the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB). After the issuance of a new directive, Covert Operations NSC 5412/2, in 1955, the Planning Coordination Group (PCG) was created. Some months later, the Special Group emerged, with requirement for membership a rank of assistant secretary or above.

The word “assassination” was never used and certainly not committed to paper. Instead, a Senate investigation later found, the president’s advisors used “secrecy, compartmentalization, circumlocution, and the avoidance of clear responsibility” to maintain plausible deniability around assassination schemes. The president’s inner circle discussed the pros and cons of “eliminating” or “neutralizing” certain individuals, and “getting rid of” or “disposing of” foreign leaders, so as to advance U.S. foreign policy goals. “Speaking in riddles to each other” became commonplace, Senate investigators found.

On February 25, 1960, members of the Special Group convened to discuss “eliminating” General Qasim, the prime minister of Iraq—the man who had ordered the machine-gun killing of the king of Iraq, his family, and his prime minister in 1958, and whom Saddam Hussein had tried to kill the following year. A stenographer took notes as the Special Group discussed setting up a Health Alteration Committee to poison Qasim. “We do not consciously seek subject’s permanent removal from the scene; we also do not object should this complication develop,” said the CIA’s Near East Division chief. After deliberation, the Special Group agreed that the prime minister should be mailed a monogrammed handkerchief laced with poison. For this, the CIA’s new deputy director of plans, Richard Bissell, brought the Agency’s top poison expert, Sidney Gottlieb, on board. The plan never materialized because Prime Minister Qasim’s internal enemies killed him first. “[He] suffered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad (an event we had nothing to do with),” a Special Group memo sarcastically clarified.

Other assassination plans discussed by the Special Group in 1960 involved Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of Congo. “[We] agree that planning for the Congo would not necessarily rule out ‘consideration’ of any particular kind of activity which might contribute to getting rid of Lumumba,” members agreed on August 25, 1960, a prime example of Special Group circumlocution. Killing Rafael Trujillo, president of the Dominican Republic, was also discussed. But the most intense focus during Eisenhower’s last year as president was on eliminating Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Raul Castro. In less than a year, these three revolutionaries had emerged from virtual anonymity to establishing a Soviet foothold on the island nation of Cuba, located just ninety miles off the coast of Florida.

“Unless Fidel and Raul Castro and Che Guevara could be eliminated in one package,” J. C. King warned the Special Group on March 9, 1960, the situation in Cuba would likely be “a long, drawn-out affair.” Admiral Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, agreed. “Any plan for the removal of Cuban leaders should be a package deal, since many of the leaders around Castro [are] even worse than Castro.” In March the Special Group reached unanimity: “Fidel and Raul Castro and Che Guevara should disappear simultaneously.”

In the six years that had passed since Che Guevara witnessed the CIA directed bombing of Guatemala City, he’d become a hard-core guerrilla fighter and an enterprising revolutionary. After leaving Mexico and secretly arriving in Cuba in 1956, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and a band of guerrilla fighters set up a training camp in the Sierra Maestra and began preparing for revolution. Their rebel army numbered between twelve and two hundred men at any given time, and with so few fighters in their ranks, loyalty was everything. This world was black-and-white; you were friend or enemy. If you were enemy, you were targeted and killed.

“Desertion, insubordination and defeatism,” wrote Che, were punishable by death. When a rebel fighter named Sergio Acuña was caught trying to run away, he was tortured, shot, and hanged. In his journal Che called the incident “sad but instructive.” When Che learned that a guide named Eutímio Guerra had sold information about their group to the Batista regime, he executed him on the spot. “The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for Eutímio so I ended the problem by giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain,” Che wrote in his diary.

After two and a half years of training in the mountains, on January 1, 1959, the rebel fighters began making their move on the capital city. Che Guevara led a column of guerrilla fighters out of the mountains and into Havana, while Fidel Castro and a separate column of revolutionaries marched on the south. By the end of the day, in an astonishing display of giving up without a fight, President Batista’s 40,000-man Cuban army laid down their arms en mass. Batista fled to the Dominican Republic, allowing the revolutionaries to assume control. “The tyranny has been overthrown!” Castro declared. “The people won the war!” Fidel Castro was the leader of Cuba now. 

Within weeks of taking power, he began executing people perceived to be leftovers from the Batista regime. He named Che Guevara commander of Havana’s La Cabaña prison, where war crime tribunals were hastily set up. Those pronounced guilty were lined up against the prison wall and executed by firing squad. In the days that followed the revolution, more than one hundred and fifty pro-Batista Cubans were shot dead. When asked by the foreign press about the summary executions, Che fired back, “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary.” Besides, he said, the concept of justice was a hypocritical creation of Western capitalists. “These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail,” Che insisted, “this is a revolution.… A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine, motivated by pure hate.”

The executions were about revenge as much as they were about redress, said Raul Castro. In an interview with the Associated Press, he called the men being executed “Batista’s assassins” and cited their responsibility for what he said were “6,000 Batista-era assassinations, in Oriente Province alone.” Cuba was not experiencing a peaceful transfer of power. There was no swearing-in ceremony; power was being conveyed through bullets, not ballots.

As it was in Vietnam, the CIA was deeply troubled by the majority support these radical revolutionaries garnered from the people. At a rally in Havana on January 21, 1959, Fidel Castro asked an estimated half-million-person crowd if they supported his policy of execution by firing squad. “I am going to ask the people something,” Castro announced from his podium. “Those who agree with the justice that is being carried out, those who agree that the [Batista] henchmen should be shot, raise your hands.” A sea of hands went up, followed by nearly two minutes of applause. “Batista is our Hitler!” Castro exclaimed, drawing a comparison between the Nuremberg trials and the executions being overseen by Che. “The allied powers punished the war criminals after the Second World War, and they have less right to do so than we have, because they meted out punishment under the ex post facto legislation, while we are punishing the war criminals under legislation passed before the crime, in public trials, in courts made up of honest men.” Castro’s background as a lawyer was not lost on the CIA. 

In no time, Fidel Castro began severing ties with American businesses, oil consortium's among them, ending fifty years of bilateral trade. He delivered firebrand anti-American speeches, rallying against capitalism and the West. When he signed a deal with the Soviet Union to buy their oil in return for military and economic aid, the Sovietization of Cuba officially began. Che started learning Russian and hosting Marxist study groups. He wrote and published a book, Guerrilla Warfare, its title an homage to Chairman Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare. Santa Claus was outlawed in Cuba, English no longer allowed. The Chaplin Cinema in downtown Havana was renamed the Carlos Marx.

In Washington, DC, the Eisenhower White House shuddered to think of all that could go wrong. “Castro’s Cuba raised the specter of a Soviet outpost at America’s doorstep,” a Senate report read. The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the oldest civilian intelligence element in the U.S. government and a direct descendant of the Office of Strategic Services Research Department, sent its director of the American Republics, a man identified in declassified documents as Mr. Hall, to Cuba to assess the situation. What Mr. Hall discovered and reported back to the State Department laid the seeds for a series of Title 50 hidden-hand operations, including assassination, in Cuba over the next four years.

“The hypnotic hold Fidel has over the mob is frightening,” Hall reported. “He can raise it to a bloodthirsty pitch then cool it to an obedient ardor. Hitler was never as good, although it must be admitted he worked on a better educated element,” Hall wrote on November 18, 1959. “Fidel gave one the impression of a complete hysteric with a Messianic complex, if not a manic-depressive,” he observed. But Mr. Hall expressed an even greater sense of foreboding when speaking of Che. “Che Guevara did not rave nor rant, spoke in the tone of a man who knows what he wants and how to get it and, as the best educated of the lot, is a truly sinister character. All gave us the devil.”

What to do? In Mr. Hall’s assessment, “[Fidel’s] hold on the lower class and on at least half of the middle class is complete. There is an atmosphere of terror prevalent and for all purposes a police state exists in Cuba. People are not only afraid to speak before strangers, but persons disappear as in the time of Batista. …” To Mr. Hall’s eye, the devil we knew, General Batista, was gone, and the new devils Che and Fidel were far more menacing than previously realized.

Which is when the Special Group began actively discussing the pros and cons of assassinating Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Raul Castro, at a meeting on January 23, 1960. The following month, the State Department approved a $4.4 million budget to get rid of the three. “Possible removal of top three leaders is receiving serious consideration at HQS,” according to declassified minutes of the meeting. A follow-up memo discussed “arranging an accident.” But the State Department’s Mr. Hall warned against such action. “The assassination of Fidel would bring about looting and a bloodbath such as Habana [sic] has never known,” cautioned Hall. Over the next four months, various means of assassination were considered. Then, in July 1960, Allen Dulles vetoed the idea. Dulles favored a covert action to invade Cuba with an “exile army” and force a coup d’état. Styled after what the CIA had done in Guatemala, this was meant to be a hidden-hand operation. Instead, it would become known to the world as the most inglorious CIA debacle of all time, the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

The invading paramilitary force would be drawn from anti-Castro refugees living in Miami. After Fidel Castro and Che Guevara took power in 1959, some 100,000 Cuban refugees fled the country, a great majority of them landing in Miami. The U.S. government set up resettlement programs, offering housing and jobs to this new diaspora. The CIA began setting up its hidden-hand operations for Cuba inside a nondescript building on the University of Miami campus, code-named Building 25. For a period of time in the 1960s, the CIA’s Miami Station was the largest CIA intelligence operation facility in the world. Case officers assigned to Operation JM/WAVE began keeping track of Cuban émigrés, creating profiles and databases, and ultimately figuring out who best to approach for its forthcoming covert action.

In the summer of 1960, the CIA began recruiting assets from a pool of young anti-Castro dissidents of fighting age to make up a paramilitary force code named Brigade 2506. What started out as twenty-eight men in a south Florida jungle training camp would eventually grow to more than 1,400 paramilitary operators, spies, saboteurs, and pilots trained by the CIA and U.S. Army Green Berets. One among them was a nineteen-year-old architecture student named Felix Rodriguez. 

Well-educated, determined, and nationalistic, Felix Rodriguez was born into a ruling-class family in Sancti Spiritus, in central Cuba, in 1942. When he was twelve, Rodriguez’s wealthy Uncle Toto, who served as President Batista’s minister of public works, paid for him to attend an American boarding school in Pennsylvania. When the revolution happened in 1959, Felix Rodriguez and his family were vacationing in Mexico. There they received word that the Castro regime had seized their properties and turned them over to the state. The family never returned to Cuba, instead moving to Miami.

Exiled from his homeland, the young Felix Rodriguez became fiercely anti-Castro. His parents begged him to accept what was, he says—to move on and embrace their new situation. They bought him an Aston Martin convertible and enrolled him in the University of Miami. But Felix Rodriguez wanted none of it. “I was more interested in joining an anti-Castro organization than I was in continuing my education,” he explains. In the fall of 1960, while preparing to begin freshman classes at the university, he was approached by a clandestine service case officer with the CIA.

“I knew the mission was to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro,” Rodriguez explained in 2017. “But I had no idea I was being recruited by the CIA.” In those days, he guesses, not one in a thousand Cubans had ever even heard of the Central Intelligence Agency. Rodriguez believed the cover story he and the other recruits were told, that the man paying for the paramilitary action was a wealthy sugar-mill baron whose property in Cuba had also been confiscated by the Castro regime.

Felix Rodriguez was thrilled to be chosen for a commando operation against the Castro regime. In September 1960, he learned the mission was a go. “We were told we were going to a secret location not in the U.S.,” Rodriguez recalls. He and a group of young Cuban exiles were driven to an airport in Opa Locka, Florida, the same airport the CIA used for its Guatemala coup d’état. “Our clothes and personal possessions were taken, we were strip-searched to make sure we weren’t carrying any forbidden articles, like a compass. Our watches were confiscated so we wouldn’t know how long we flew.” The truck drove into a closed hangar, where the men disembarked, only to be greeted by U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) officials, who gave each of them a form to fill out. It dawned on Rodriguez that “if we were leaving the country, we were apparently doing it with the approval of the U.S. government.” Dressed in army fatigues and a khaki shirt, the rebel fighters were loaded onto a C-54 aircraft, its windows painted black, then flown for several hours, landing just before dawn. “After we landed, a jeep drove up and I noticed immediately that it had Guatemalan plates.” The CIA’s paramilitary army was in Guatemala City as guests of President Roberto Alejos Arzu, a friend of the CIA.

The CIA’s anti-Castro covert-action training camp was located eighty miles northwest of Guatemala City, in the countryside of Retalhuleu, code-named Camp Trax. At this abandoned coffee plantation, owned by a business associate of President Arzu, U.S. Army Green Berets trained the Cuban émigrés in guerrilla warfare techniques including pistol shooting, map reading, and hand-tohand combat but also more ambitious tactics, like how to land an amphibious craft on a rocky beach, and how to use explosives powerful enough to take out a bridge. Conditions were grim, Rodriguez recalls. It was humid beyond measure; poisonous insects and alligators were a constant threat. But morale was high, thanks to the camp’s enthusiastic commanding officer, Colonel Napoleón Valeriano.

Colonel Valeriano was an unconventional-warfare legend among commandos in training. As a young army soldier in World War II, Valeriano had been infiltrated into the Philippines by submarine. There, he led guerrilla warfare operations against the Japanese alongside Colonel Volckmann, one of the original founders of the U.S. Army Special Forces, with General Robert McClure and Colonel Aaron Bank. Valeriano’s staff of trainers at Camp Trax were Ukrainian-born Green Berets, beneficiaries of the Lodge-Philbin Act, called Lodge-billers, many of whom trained with the 10th Special Forces at Bad Tölz. These Green Berets taught the Cuban exile army how to shoot Thompson sub-machine guns, 57 mm recoil-less rifles, and .45-caliber pistols, remembers Rodriguez, an eighteen-year-old novice at the time. They gave us “instructions in explosives, communications, jungle survival, and escape and evasion techniques. We learned how to judge the distance of the enemy from sound and muzzle flash.”

Four months into the training, the group was flown to the Panama Canal Zone, to the U.S. Base, Fort Clayton, for a New Year’s Eve party. “Our instructors provided Heineken beer and wine so we could celebrate.” Shortly before midnight, Rodriguez remembers being struck with “a truly inspired idea,” he explains, “an operation that would shorten the war and save lives.” He volunteered to assassinate Fidel Castro. “And the CIA took me up on the idea,” he says.

One week later, Felix Rodriguez was flown to Miami, where he was taken to a safe house in the Homestead area outside the city. “I was given a rifle and told to wait.” Soon, he’d be infiltrated into Cuba by boat, his handler told him, then taken to Havana, where local partisans working with the CIA would assist him. In Havana, he would go to the upper floor of a predetermined building, set up his high-powered rifle in an open window, and assassinate Fidel Castro as Castro rode by, during a parade on the street below.

While the CIA was training Brigade 2506 for a paramilitary invasion of Cuba, the Special Group approved another covert-action operation inside Cuba’s Caribbean island neighbor the Dominican Republic, five hundred miles to the east. The plan was to assassinate the nation’s corrupt un-elected leader, General Rafael Trujillo. 

 For three decades Trujillo, kept in power by American allies, had ruled the country by terror. Trujillo was power-mad and masochistic. Historians hold him responsible for tens of thousands of extrajudicial killings, including those in 1937 in the border region with Haiti, which would come to be known as the Parsley Massacre. “Few bullets were used,” according to a UN Security Council report on the mass killing. “Instead, 20,000–30,000 Haitians were bludgeoned and bayoneted, then herded into the sea, where sharks finished what Trujillo had begun.” For reasons that remain murky, suddenly in winter of 1960 President Eisenhower’s Special Group decided the United States would end its support of Trujillo. Ambassador Joseph Farland remembers appealing to Trujillo’s daughter Flor, during a visit to her home outside the nation’s capital. “I drove out to her house in a Volkswagen that I had and said… your father is going to be assassinated. There is no question in my mind whatsoever about that… we want him to retire and leave this country.” When Trujillo refused an offer of exile, the Special Group agreed it was time to eliminate him.

“He kept law and order… and he didn’t bother the United States. So that was fine with us,” said the State Department’s Henry Dearborn, in a 1991 oral history interview. Dearborn served as chargé d’affaires at the embassy in Santo Domingo, which had been renamed Ciudad Trujillo, or Trujillo City. “Something had to be done about this man,” Dearborn recalled. On March 16, 1961, “matters took an active turn,” according to a CIA document marked Top Secret, later reviewed by a Senate Intelligence Committee. “They [the CIA] developed an assassination plot which, because of my close relationship with them, I was fully aware of,” Dearborn testified.

Dearborn served as liaison between the CIA and the assassination team, which was made up of seven anti-Trujillo partisans. “I carried out the contacts with the opposition reporting to CIA,” Dearborn clarified. “We were using all these weird means of communication because we didn’t want to be seen with each other. Things like notes in the bottom of the grocery bag, rolled up in cigars.”

Richard Bissell, then working as CIA station chief in Santo Domingo, oversaw plans on the ground. On March 22, he requested that headquarters send him “three .38 caliber revolvers and ammunition.” In a separate cable, Dearborn wrote, “Plans for Trujillo’s assassination coming to a head.” The following week, Bissell briefed Dearborn: a shipment of four machine guns and 240 rounds of ammunition was en route to the U.S. embassy, which he was to give to the assassins in a clandestine manner. Separately, three carbine rifles were being dropped off at the U.S. embassy by a navy contact, Bissell said. Dearborn kept the assassins in the loop through a liaison, or cutout, so as to ensure he never had direct contact with the killers. “I had a different typewriter on which I typed out my messages to the opposition so that it wouldn’t be traced to Embassy typewriters,” Dearborn recalled, but in truth, “I had told the [State] Department via CIA communications… all about the plan.”

Dearborn’s job was to maintain plausible deniability should anything go wrong. “I knew how they were planning to do it, I knew, more or less, who was involved. Although I was always able to say that I personally did not know any of the assassins, I knew those who were pulling the strings.” Until then, he had a facade of diplomacy to uphold. “There had to be a certain set of circumstances when they could put their plan into action.” For now, he was ordered to wait.

Meanwhile, in Miami, the lethal covert-action operation in which Felix Rodriguez would assassinate Fidel Castro was given the green light. It was the second week in January 1961, Rodriguez recalls, “just days before John F. Kennedy took office as president.” Late one night, a handler picked up Felix Rodriguez from the safe house outside Miami where he’d been staying. Rifle case in hand, he was driven to a small beach in the Florida Keys. “The driver flashed the lights and a small boat came ashore,” he recalls. Rodriguez climbed into a small rubber boat that ferried him out to a much larger yacht waiting about a half mile out at sea.

“The captain was an American,” Rodriguez remembers, “but the crew were all Ukrainians. Tough-looking SOBs who carried Soviet bloc automatic weapons.” Back at the safe house, Rodriguez was told he wouldn’t have to sight the rifle when he arrived in Cuba. “It had already been zeroed in. The resistance army [in Cuba] had obtained a building in Havana, facing a location that Castro frequented at the time, and they’d managed to presight the rifle,” says Rodriguez.

Under the cover of night, the yacht sped across the ocean to infiltrate Cuba near Varadero Beach on the north coast. “We showed up at a predetermined location,” recalls Rodriguez, but the rendezvous boat failed to show and the group returned to Miami. Days later, another attempt was made. Arriving at the target area this second time, Rodriguez recalls seeing a hundred-foot-long ship, “clearly far too large for a clandestine op. It looked like a ghost ship. We couldn’t see anybody on board.” 

The group aborted the mission a second time and again returned to Miami. On a third infiltration attempt, the yacht suffered hydraulic failure. Back in Miami the vessel was met by a case officer who asked Felix Rodriguez for the rifle and ammunition. “They said they’d changed their minds about the mission,” Rodriguez recalls. 

In Washington, DC, President Eisenhower and his staff prepared to leave the White House. The baton would now pass to the handsome young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. The day before Kennedy’s inauguration, he met with President Eisenhower in the Oval Office. Partially declassified records from this meeting, on January 19, 1961, indicate that the outgoing and incoming presidents discussed the most critical covert-action operations being planned by the Special Group: in Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. The incoming president was struck by the idea of covert action—of a hidden-hand power to be wielded at the sole discretion of the commander in chief. One of his first actions as president was to meet with the Special Group to learn more.

Just eight days after taking office, the CIA’s Edward Lansdale briefed President Kennedy on the dire situation in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh and General Giap’s mobile warfare campaign was as aggressive as it was ruthless, assassinating an average of eleven civil servants every day. “Vietnam is in a critical condition and we should treat it as a combat area of the Cold War, as an area requiring emergency treatment,” Lansdale told the president. 

Kennedy appealed directly to Congress, bringing to its attention the assassination campaign. In a speech called “Urgent National Needs,” he warned of Soviet hidden-hand operations in Vietnam and elsewhere, of the existential threat communism posed to the free world.

“Their aggression is more often concealed than open,” Kennedy said. “They have fired no missiles; and their troops are seldom seen. They send arms, agitators, aid, technicians and propaganda to every troubled area. But where fighting is required, it is usually done by others—by guerrillas striking at night, by assassins striking alone—assassins who have taken the lives of four thousand civil officers in the last twelve months in Vietnam alone.”

Vietnam, Laos, Cuba. President Kennedy inherited complex hidden-hand operations in each of these three tiny countries from his predecessor. He also inherited President Eisenhower’s Special Group, to which he quickly added his brother, U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy. It was an unusual arrangement, with far-reaching consequences. As chairman of the Special Group, Attorney General Robert Kennedy—the most senior Justice Department official in the United States—was now in charge of overseeing the CIA’s covert operations, most of which the majority of Americans would consider illegal. Assassination was at the top of the list.

Next Part  2 
1961
An Assassination Capability 112s

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