634 Ways to Kill Fidel

by Fabian Escalante

Overview

A sprawling account of the various, creative, often bizarre, yet incredibly disturbing attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Soon to be a TV series from Jed Mercurio, show runner for "The Bodyguard," and Richard Brown, producer of "True Detective" and "Catch-22."

Fabián Escalante, the founder of the Cuban intelligence services, and head of the Cuban State Security Department, provides a clear-eyed first-person account of his experiences defending Fidel Castro from the extraordinary attempts to take his life. From lethal poisons to plastic explosives to bazookas, Escalante introduces and describes an array of assassination plots and historical figures and depicts the ensuing cat-and-mouse game in the midst of the Cold War.
Written in the style of a political thriller yet based on real events, 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro is a well-researched and documented series of vignettes put together by multiple investigations in Cuba and the experiences of the author, who participated in several of them; dozens of interviews with participants; extensive documentary evidence; and the collaboration of officials, and undercover agents who dismantled these plots. Filled with harrowing stories of deceitful FBI tactics such as moles who infiltrated the revolutionary Cuban government and gained a reputation with them with the ultimate goal of bombing their military bases. As well as undercover attempts to give Fidel poison laced cigars, Escalante takes the reader from DC to New York, Miami to Havana and uncovers the intricate conspiracy to silence dissent and kill Fidel Castro.
634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro is filled to the brim with historical details on the CIA, Cuba, the communist movement, US government officials, and Fidel himself. Escalante’s first-hand account provides evidence of the lengths to which the CIA went through to assassinate Fidel Castro and the determined efforts to protect him and what he stood for.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644210987
Publisher:	Seven Stories Press
Publication date:	04/19/2022
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Fabián Escalante Font (Havana, 1940) was a founder of Cuba's intelligence services and held various leadership roles over his 36 years in this service including, head of the Cuban State Security Department. director of Cuba's Center for Historical Investigations on State Security and directed Cuba's investigation into the assassination of JFK, which he later turned into a book.

Read an Excerpt

Preamble to an Obsession

He consulted his watch again. For several minutes he had been concealed in the dark doorway of an empty house facing the little airport of Fort Lauderdale in Florida. His gaze was fixed on some lights in the airport administration area. At his feet was a can of gasoline, waiting to be put to use. Suddenly, the lights went out and the guard left in the direction of a nearby café.

The silent observer picked up the can of fuel, crossed the street and entered the airport with swift and sure steps. Once there, he headed for an area where three P-51 Mustang aircraft were parked. He opened the can and meticulously spilled its contents around the planes until it was empty. He then retreated to a prudent distance and threw a lit match in the direction of the three aircraft, which were rapidly engulfed in flames. A voracious fire illuminated the night, while the man made his getaway in a waiting car. As the car pulled away, the sirens of a firefighting unit began to wail nearby.

Alan Robert Nye had been recruited a few months earlier by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to penetrate groups of revolutionary Cuban émigrés who were conspiring against the dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista. Nye was a pilot and had apparently been expelled from the air force after his base chief received an anonymous note accusing him of conspiring with the Cubans to launch air attacks on military targets in Cuba.

In fact, Nye’s “expulsion” was a plan carefully laid by the FBI to give him a convincing introduction to the Cuban émigrés fighting the Batista dictatorship. The plan spiraled out of control when the Cubans, overly enthusiastic about the project to bomb military targets on the island, acquired an aircraft to undertake the mission. Nye found himself in a blind alley, because if he did not attack the proposed targets, the revolutionary émigrés would become suspicious. As a way out, the FBI ordered him to destroy the planes and to blame supposed Batista agents for the sabotage.

After that action, the FBI introduced Nye to Efraín Hernández, the Cuban consul in Miami and an agent of the Batista dictatorship responsible for keeping the émigré community in Florida under observation. Hernández briefly explained that the FBI had entrusted him with an important mission in Cuba. The details would be provided later but he assured Nye that a large sum of money would be paid for his services, and that top members of the US administration were aware of the plans.

Nye did not know much about Cuba, only that it was seen as a paradise for tourism, gambling and prostitution. So he regarded the mission as a Caribbean vacation. On November 12, 1958, he arrived at Havana airport, where a black car waited for him at the foot of the aircraft steps. The vehicle drove him at speed to the Hotel Comodoro, located near the beach in a tranquil Havana neighborhood.

Waiting impatiently for him there were colonels Carlos Tabernilla and Orlando Piedra — the former, chief of the air force, and the latter, head of the secret police. After the usual introductions they moved to the hotel bar, where they began to talk at a table set at a distance from the others. Tabernilla explained to Nye the details of the plan in which he was to be involved: to assassinate Fidel Castro, the rebel leader who was challenging the Batista dictatorship from the country’s eastern mountains, the Sierra Maestra.

The idea seemed simple enough. Nye was to infiltrate the rebel ranks in the area where Castro was operating. Once with him, he would present his “revolutionary” credentials and the project to bomb military airports in Cuba from Florida. The colonels were convinced that Castro would be seduced by Nye’s personality. They had two reasons for this belief: one, Nye was a US citizen, a Yankee representing the most powerful nation on Earth; and two, the rebels needed planes to respond to Batista’s air force, which was constantly bombing the civilian population in the rebel zones and causing serious destruction. Nye was a pilot and had an impressive letter of introduction from the Cuban émigrés in Florida, and thus would be an ideal pilot for any small aircraft the rebels could get their hands on, which could also be used to strike Batista’s military positions.

Tabernilla and Piedra explained to Nye that he would be protected by an army command and, most importantly, that $50,000 would be deposited in his bank account once Castro was eliminated.

That same afternoon, the three men headed for Camp Columbia, the headquarters of Batista’s army to coordinate the project with Colonel Manuel García Cáceres, chief of the fortress in Holguín, capital of the northern region of Oriente province. Nye and García quickly agreed that the former would travel to the colonel’s command post within a few days and initiate the operation from there.

Despite the brevity of his stay in Havana, Nye found the time to visit the capital’s main nightclubs and was able to understand why his fellow countrymen were interested in supporting the government of General Batista, who guaranteed to maintain Cuba as a haven for safe US investments as well as gambling and entertainment.

On December 20, 1958, Nye was in Holguín going over the main aspects of the homicidal plot with Colonel García. Four days later, in the company of a squadron of Batista’s soldiers in the vicinity of the town of Santa Rita, he was infiltrated into the operational zone of Fidel Castro’s rebels. That night, they stashed a .38-caliber revolver and a Remington .30-06 rifle with a telescopic sight in a previously selected site, and Nye bade farewell to the troops.

The following day he went on alone. Within a few hours he was captured by a rebel patrol and he informed them of his desire to join the revolutionary combatants and to meet Fidel Castro. Initially, things did not go according to plan. The young officer commanding the patrol did not appear very interested in him and confined him to a camp where wounded soldiers were recovering, explaining that in due course his case would be considered.

This did not overly bother Nye. On the contrary, it provided a way for him to familiarize himself with the territory. He imagined that as soon as Castro, who was in that area, knew of his presence, he would send for him and the opportunity would come. He would just have to wait until nightfall to get to his cache, retrieve the weapons and ambush Fidel in a convenient location.

On January 1, 1959, he heard the stunning news: Batista had fled, and the rebels were preparing to deal the final blow to the battered and demoralized government forces. He was in total shock, because nobody had given him any reason to consider this possibility. In his conversations with Batista’s officers, he had not detected any hint of weakness in their government, let alone that the troop of “bearded ones” were on the verge of defeating it. Nevertheless, he thought to himself, there was no evidence against him, and as soon as the situation normalized, the rebels would set him free. If they did not, he would turn to his embassy for help. At the end of the day, he concluded, he was a US citizen and his rights were guaranteed.

On January 16, 1959, he was transferred to Havana for a routine investigation, or so he was told. An amiable rebel captain took a statement from him and then explained that he would have to wait a few hours while his story was verified. Nye committed a major error by mentioning the Hotel Comodoro as the place he had stayed on arriving in Cuba. In a matter of hours, the investigators had discovered two elements that convicted him beyond any doubt: first, the name he gave in the hotel, G. Collins, was not his real name; and second, his expenses there had been covered by Colonel Tabernilla.

The rebel officer interviewed him again and asked him to clarify the situation. Nye was unable to conceal the truth for very long. He confessed to the plot and named its instigators. In April of that year, Nye was convicted by the courts and expelled from the country through the US embassy. That was the end of the first criminal attempt on Fidel Castro’s life undertaken with the participation of a US government agency — the FBI — and the complicity of Batista’s police force.

Other assassination plans devised against Fidel Castro over many years involved weapons such as lethal poisons, powerful plastic explosives, cigars containing dangerous substances, grenades to be launched in public areas, guns with sophisticated telescopic sights, poison-filled syringes so fine that contact with the skin would be unnoticed, rocket launchers and bazookas, and explosive charges concealed in underground drains with a timer ticking down the minutes and seconds.

Only a few months after the triumph of the revolution, the United States proposed the elimination of the Cuban leader as the most expeditious way to overthrow the revolutionary government. This was hardly something new in US politics, as various presidents, politicians and human rights activists have been assassinated to prevent their ideas affecting public opinion. Leaders from other parts of the world have also been eliminated on the advice or encouragement of US ambassadors and consuls when they have been regarded as potential enemies of Washington’s political and economic strategies, to the point where this method became an instrument of policy — the end justifying the means, but always allowing the US government the cover of “plausible denial.”

The assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 was undoubtedly one of the most dramatic episodes in US political history. Over the years, various commissions were created to determine who instigated the crime and who carried it out. Nevertheless, those investigations, supported by million-dollar budgets, have only produced various hypotheses and lists of groups possibly interested in the president’s demise.

Prompted by the Watergate scandal, which confirmed that CIA agents actively participated in clandestine activities against foreign politicians and US citizens, and under public pressure, in 1975 the US Senate created a commission headed by Senator Frank Church to investigate intelligence activity related to the assassination of foreign political leaders hostile to Washington’s policies. Senator Church’s commission report exposed, for the first time, the existence of an institutional mechanism for political killings that deployed all kinds of special weapons, poisons and other sophisticated means that were created in CIA laboratories.

The Church Commission, however, only uncovered a minor part of the CIA’s criminal plans. A complicitous silence sealed the lips of the organization’s agents and chiefs who, headed by CIA director at the time, Richard Helms, refuted and withheld information that would have unmasked the shady assassination mechanism. In the case of Cuba, the commission concluded that there were merely eight conspiracies hatched against Fidel Castro, some of which, according to the investigators, never materialized. But this is far from the truth...

Table of Contents

Preface to the Second Edition 1

Introduction 3

Preamble to an Obsession 7

1 With the Tigers 17

2 A Tough Guy in Havana 35

3 La Cosa Nostra 49

4 The Sacred Monsters 67

5 Alternatives to the Crisis 85

6 Operation Liborio: "Cuba in Flames" 105

7 Task Force W: "A Chocolate Milkshake" 119

8 .375 Magnum 135

9 An "Autonomous Operation" and Old Friends 149

10 AM/LASH and Rolando Cubela 159

11 The Condor in Chile 183

12 New York and Miami: Alpha 66 197

13 The Saturnino Beltrán Commando Unit 213

14 Twilight of an Obsession 219

Epilogue 225

Chronology of the Crimes 1959-2000 229

Glossary 261