The Great Game in Cuba by Joan Mellen

Author:Joan Mellen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626362321
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

LITTLE BOY BLUE AND OUR CHIVAS REGAL FRIEND, 1962-1967

“If Little Boy Blue was confronted with a situation, he would act with firmness, despite Vietnam and Berlin.”

Michael J. P. Malone, conveying a

message from CIA’s David Atlee Phillips,

his “Chivas Regal Friend,” March 1962.

Despite the death of Sorí, which would haunt him all his life, and the fracturing of Unidad, Alberto soldiered on. “Sucker that I am!” he exclaimed to me with sardonic irony fifty years later. “[CIA] never went into action in the way we wanted.” At the time, he asked himself, “Am I going to fold my arms and not do anything?”

The Tejana was feeling its age. Alberto began to utilize CIA ships. It was too dangerous now for him to sail into Cuba himself, and so he directed operations from land. It had always been his ethos not to take unnecessary risks.

As Alberto was dismissing the crew of the no-longer seaworthy Tejana, Clarence arrived to say goodbye.

“What do you need?” Clarence said. As an individual, he was eager to be of assistance to Alberto one last time.

Alberto requested two sets of official CIA maps of Cuba, in Spanish.

Clarence complied. He wept as he said his last goodbye to Alberto. “Clarence” would soon perish, a quiet sacrifice to CIA’s tangled operation chasing down Che Guevara in the Congo.

As Alberto’s CIA handler, Clarence was replaced by Robert Wall, as CIA’s pretense that it was interested in helping the Cubans overthrow Fidel Castro continued. Alberto’s FBI file still identifies his CIA handler as “Roderick,” “his contact in CIA who directs all his activities.”

“You should do this!” Wall would order. Behind his back, the Cubans nicknamed him “clavo” or “nail,” because of his habit of slamming his fist into his palm as if he were hammering a nail. He was a retired U.S. Marine colonel and seemed to be a man with tunnel vision, intelligent, focused, and practical, but cold.

Wall’s title was “Assistant Chief, Operations Branch” out of JMWAVE. There he competed unsuccessfully for influence with the brutal David Sánchez Morales. Those whom Wall handled came to conclude that he didn’t know anything about Cuba.

The chief of station, Theodore Shackley, preferred Morales. Still, once when Alberto had trouble re-entering the United States after a trip to Jamaica, since he possessed only a tarjeta, not even a green card, Wall dispatched his agents. The screech of tires outside the Miami Airport heralded CIA’s rescue of its asset.

Determined to retain his independence from CIA, Alberto trained operatives in the Carolinas and Georgia as well as in Florida. Traveling down the Florida coast in search of training locations, he took along four people from the Tejana, none from CIA. A promising location was “Adam’s Key,” owned, however, by Richard Nixon’s confederate, Bebe Rebozo. Rebozo confided to Alberto that one night Nixon had lost $12,000 at Havana’s Hotel Nacional, then said haughtily that he would send them a check.

Alberto arranged to meet Rebozo at a bar on Coral Way in Miami. Rebozo had a laundromat business and Alberto claimed he had a laundromat to sell.

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