Author Brian Latell, a professor, scholar, and retired CIA officer who had been active in foreign intelligence for 35 years, relies extensively on information provided by half a dozen Cuban defectors and several retired CIA officers. However, the most intriguing and reliable revelations (i.e., pure facts without any embellishment or speculation) come to light from Florentino Aspillaga Lombard ("Tiny"), the most knowledgeable and valuable foreign intelligence officer to ever defect from Cuba's powerful Directorio General de Inteligencia (DGI).
Tiny Aspillaga defected that fateful summer in 1987 in the midst of the turbulent and historic years of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika -- but still four years before the total collapse of the Soviet empire. Aspillaga had served with distinction in the elite ranks of the DGI and had even received a personal commendation from Fidel Castro. After Aspillaga began working with the CIA, he immediately exposed dozens of Cuban double agents, who had infiltrated American intelligence, political and cultural institutions, as well as various anti-Castro groups. Many of these Cuban double agents had been operating for over two decades, inflicting untold damage on the U.S. The most highly placed double agents were handled personally by Fidel Castro, who, for nearly fifty years, acted as "Cuba's supreme spymaster"!
Aspillaga's revelations proved and subsequent investigations corroborated that the CIA had been for a number of years outclassed and humbled by the Cuban DGI in spycraft. Although "the Americans had been careless, overconfident, deceived in ways that they thought unimaginable," according to Latell, "none had been dishonest or disloyal." The Aspillaga defection changed that and he became a marked man.
Following Cuba's year of the spy (1987), when six major defections took place including that of Aspillaga and the much-celebrated Cuban hero, General Rafael del Pino, Castro ordered a devastating purge of both the Cuban Interior Ministry and the island's secret police. Aspillaga's defection was a crushing blow to Fidel personally and to Cuban foreign intelligence generally, even affecting internal G-2 operations. The head of Cuban counterintelligence in Havana committed suicide with a pistol shot through his mouth. But make no mistake about it, despite these losses, Cuban foreign intelligence remains probably to this day an agency without peer in the cloak and dagger, lethal game of human intelligence (HI) and counterintelligence (CI) in the world. And also in judging the CIA, we must remember that totalitarian police states have astronomical advantages over the foreign spy agencies of the free world that frequently go unnoticed.(3) These advantages usually include a vast network of informants, where everyone is afraid of and snitches on everybody else; citizens have no constitutional or civil rights; national identity cards are mandated and required for travel (with concomitant restriction of movement for the foreign spies as well as the citizens); unlimited resources are available for the state spies and secret police, etc. Cuba had all of these advantages, as well as superior spycraft led by Fidel himself, a brilliant but evil spymaster with unlimited power, the supreme autocrat.
Latell reveals the existence of and discloses the content of Castro's Armageddon letter of October 22, 1962 (the last day of the Cuban Missile Crisis) to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. In that letter, Castro advocates a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S., using not only the island's strategic and tactical assembled missile force but also the USSR nuclear arsenal. Khrushchev not only turned him down but the emotionally charged, diabolical impetuosity of the Cuban leader frightened and prompted Khrushchev to immediately cave in to JFK's demands.
Latell dismantles the myth of impending reconciliation between Castro and Kennedy after the Cuban Missile Crisis that was supposedly cut short only by Kennedy's assassination. Fidel told his guest, the prominent French Journalist Jean Daniel who had doubled as Kennedy's emissary, that he would never foreswear his Marxist beliefs, renounce his allegiance to Moscow, or abandon the exportation of revolution to other countries in Latin America or the rest of the world. Fidel would not even compromise with Kennedy's suggestion that he become a nonaligned, independent, communist leader like Tito of Yugoslavia and break away from the Soviet bloc. The ray of light that many journalists and normally well-informed people refused to see because they were taken in by the dark shadows of disinformation -- namely that the two leaders respected each other and were close to reconciliation -- was a myth and not reality. Behind the scenes both leaders continued to plot against each other in the worst traditions of the cold war. In the end, prior to 1987, Fidel prevailed because of the superiority his DGI had over the CIA in spycraft, human intelligence, and general aforementioned advantages that an island police state possesses over those of the free world.
The final piece in his jigsaw puzzle is the astounding information provided by Tiny Aspillaga. The super defector revealed that as a young radio operator at Castro's ultra-secret Jaimanitas listening post on the northern coast of Cuba near Havana, he was suddenly and without precedent ordered to redirect his listening antennas from his usual target the CIA and switch the dials to Texas! It was the morning of November 22, 1963, three hours before the JFK assassination that took place at 12:30 p.m. (Dallas time) on that same day. Aspillaga informed Latell: "Castro knew. They knew Kennedy would be killed."
I will not spoil the book for you by revealing how Castro knew and the machinations that probably took place leading to the tragic assassination of JFK. This review is extracted from a much longer and illustrated essay reviewing this book in haciendapublishingdotcom. Suffice to say, I recommend Latell's book for all readers interested in Cuban intelligence during the Cold War, Fidel Castro, the CIA, and the secret aspects of the Kennedy assassination. Despite a couple of quibbles, one of which is the accusation that Comandante Rolando Cubela was a double agent working for Castro. Latell has not convinced me, and I continue to disagree with this important but not essential point for reasons I have already written about in my book Cuba in Revolution - Escape from a Lost Paradise (2002). My second quibble is the paucity of illustrations. There were many photos of American heroes and miscellaneous villains I would have liked included. But this book is good. Get it, and read it!
Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D. is the author of Cuba in Revolution - Escape from a Lost Paradise (2002) and many essays on the cold war and communism, including "Stalin's Mysterious Death" (2011) and "Stalin, Communists and Fatal Statistics (2011)
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Top reviews from other countries
- Paul MarksReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 29, 2014
Hard facts about a world too often dominated by fantasy. The CIA shown as (mostly) hopelessly out of touch and incompetant.
