Memoirs of the Man the White House Said Didn't Exist
Barger, Robert Parry and Brian
Memoirs of the Man the White House Said Didn't Exist It's all here: the Bay of Pigs, the capture of Che Guevara, and the Iran-contra affair. But the author is Ollie North with a Cuban accent. by...
...A more comprehensive explanation of that time frame is vital to evaluating Rodriguez's later claim that he wasn't recruited by North to help the contras militarily until September 1985...
...His moment of truth had come, and he was conducting himself like a man...
...Another big moment in Rodriguez's lifelong struggle against Fidel Castro was the Bay of Pigs, but ironically, Rodriguez did next to nothing during the invasion...
...As a measure of how easily the press could be gulled, however, the two battletested columnists swallowed Abrams's story whole...
...However, before the vote, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell argued against Gregg's nomination, contending that the ex-CIA man either lied or showed remarkable incompetence...
...It was October 9, 1967, 2:15 p.m...
...But according to Rodriguez's bizarre account of Che's last hours, the CIA-trained Cuban exile and his longtime nemesis become something like friends...
...So farmers started showing up at Dominican army posts with burlap bags of bearded heads to collect their rewards," Rodriguez writes...
...Hasenfus's claims, of course, were heatedly denied by the White House, but the alleged roles of the CIA and Bush in North's contra operation remain to this day two of the most frustrating loose ends of the Iran-contra scandal...
...In Shadow Warrior, however, Posada is portrayed as an innocent scapegoat who crossed a vengeful politician, Carlos Andres Perez, Venezuela's president both then and now...
...Still, I saw no reason to desecrate Che's corpse...
...And Trujillo ended up paying a lot more than $250,000—because a lot more bearded heads were turning up than there were Cuban invaders...
...It was a tremendously emotional moment for me," Rodriguez says...
...According to former FBI agent Carter Cornick, the evidence against Posada and three others charged with the crime was overwhelming...
...On a CNN cable news show, Abrams told columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak that "I can say first of all there's no Max Gomez...
...Rodriguez then turns the job over to a soldier, Mario Teran, "whose face shone as if he had been drinking...
...Short, stocky, and peacock-proud, Rodriguez is a complex man who, like North, has a certainty in his life's mission that is both attractive and troubling in the moral netherworld of the 20th century...
...Enders had just wrapped up a tour as head of the CIA's paramilitary forces, where he directly oversaw the helicopter attacks and mining of Nicaragua's harbors...
...Next to Castro, Che was the greatest prize for the Cuban exiles and the CIA...
...In this autobiography*, Rodriguez offers much less than that...
...As other Cuban captives are executed nearby, Rodriguez and Che chat...
...Most were captured or killed soon after their clandestine landings...
...In the over-heated rhetoric of Shadow Warrior, Rodriguez tries to elevate himself to Che's historic level...
...Rodriguez's "holy war" against Castro, however, was far from over...
...The problem with the Iran-contra affair in general— and Bush's participation in particular—is that the truth seems to have gotten so wrapped up in plausible deniability that neither the press nor Congress has had the patience to sort out the facts...
...Even after the Hasenfus shootdown, the Reagan administration, grown cocky from its long and easy manipulation of the press, continued to issue glaringly false stories...
...Their international war against communism next took them to Central America, where they were widely suspected of training death squads, including one within the contra army, which eventually provoked protests from the CIA...
...Rodriguez's book does add some tantalizing new clues about his role in the Iran-contra affair...
...But I admire you...
...He'd suffered casualties at the hands of Che's guerrilla band...
...Although Rodriguez provides no details about his activities (and refused to be interviewed for this article), the Argentine military's principal operation was establishing the contra army...
...In an interview, Enders said he did not take Rodriguez's allegations of criminal wrongdoing to his agency superiors because "he didn't approach me as a CIA employee, but as a friend...
...Rodriguez says that, unable to locate his superior, he authorized the attack, only to find out later that the ship actually was the Sierra Aranzazu, a Spanish freighter...
...Che Guevara was dead...
...Also during this time, the Argentines sent a group of contras to stage a machine-gun and grenade attack on a leftist radio station in Costa Rica, according to the group's leader, Hugo Villagra...
...But in the book, Rodriguez offers a different account...
...Indeed, if it hadn't been for the Sandinista soldier's lucky aim, the American people might have been kept happily ignorant for years about how the nation's foreign policy was really being run during the Reagan era...
...He would continue that crusade even after retiring from the CIA in 1976 because of a bad back...
...Rodriguez clearly sees this moment as the high point of his CIA career, even though he claims the agency wanted the captured guerrilla leader brought back alive from the jungles of Bolivia...
...One of the first names out of Hasenfus's mouth when he was brought before the international press in Managua three days later was "Max Gomez...
...Rodriguez says he personally gave the order to kill Che—but not before a couple of warm embraces between countrymen...
...He later gave Che's pipe to Teran "so you will remember your great deed...
...For instance, Rodriguez says he worked with the Argentine military in 1980-81, showing them "how to set up intelligence networks in Central America that kept a close watch on events without attracting unwanted attention...
...In many ways, Rodriguez is an 011ie North with a Cuban accent...
...Initially, Gregg admitted that the planning memos "baffled" him, but in confirmation hearings on his nomination to be ambassador to South Korea this spring, he suggested that a secretary might have just mistakenly typed "resupply of the contras" when she had actually been told "resupply of the copters" because Rodriguez had been flying counter-insurgency helicopter missions in El Salvador...
...But in the fall of 1986, when confronted by reporters asking if he had discussed the contras with Rodriguez, Gregg denied falsely that he had...
...But when the CIA-backed invaders reached the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, the infiltrators discovered little support and were quickly rounded up...
...On CIA orders, Rodriguez infiltrated Cuba in early 1961 to prepare for what he and the CIA expected would be a popular insurrection coinciding with the invasion...
...Except it wasn't a dream...
...Sent to Bolivia by the CIA to help train troops to counter Che's latest guerrilla adventure, Rodriguez excitedly flies to the scene of Che's capture...
...The so-called Max Gomez, the CIA operative, supposedly hired by the CIA or Vice President Bush, doesn't even exist...
...A variety of sources have linked Rodriguez to early arms shipments to the contras, and some participants claim Bush's office played an early organizing role in the secret network that followed a congressional ban on CIA assistance in 1984...
...Moved by Bush's inauguration, Rodriguez says he harkened back to those magical prerevolutionary days in Cuba...
...After the raid, the contras were jailed but later released when contra colleagues hijacked a Costa Rican-bound airliner...
...The attack with a recoilless rifle and machine guns killed the captain, wounded many of his crew, and set the ship on fire...
...It is selective in some areas...
...But this doesn't look like a cover-up, and it doesn't because there's no equivocation...
...He then fled to the Venezuelan embassy and was returned to the United States, having survived the Bay of Pigs fiasco without firing a shot...
...Apparently to explain the signs of torture on Che's body later described by Bolivian military officials, Rodriguez says he caught a Bolivian soldier striking Che's body with a stick...
...In a mudbrick schoolhouse at La Higuera, Che lies dirty, bound on the floor, his leg wound oozing blood...
...Asked about the sketchy accounts of his Central American work in the early 1980s, Rodriguez's coauthor Weisman acknowledged that Rodriguez had chosen to leave out many of the details...
...Posada was put in charge of distributing weapons and other supplies...
...The evidence included confessions by the two men who placed the bomb on the plane that directly implicated Posada and another Cuban exile, Orlando Bosch...
...Robert Parry is a reporter at Newsweek...
...It's like all autobiographies," Weisman said...
...Gregg's failure to recognize the significance of Rodriguez's and North's activities in the resupply of the contras during a period when such activities were prohibited by law is alarming," said Mitchell...
...Gregg later acknowledged discussing the contras with Rodriguez on August 8, 1986, but insisted that he had been kept in the dark before then, and, even after learning the truth, withheld the information from his boss, the vice president...
...Shortly after Rodriguez's discussion with Enders, memos were prepared for a May 1, 1986, meeting between Bush and Rodriguez that list one expected topic as "resupply of the contras...
...But "Max Gomez"—or Felix Rodriguez—did exist...
...Without assessing any of the evidence against Posada, Rodriguez dismisses the allegations as unfounded and thereby justifies hiring the fugitive terrorist to work as his assistant on North's contra resupply operation in 1985...
...local time, and it was as if I were in the middle of a dream...
...by Robert Parry and Brian Barger It was to be one of the last flights of Oliver North's little air force of broken-down planes and burnt-out pilots...
...It was one of those narrowly constructed statements that must have thrilled Abrams, who has embraced deceit like a kind of secular religion...
...book, modestly subtitled "The CIA Hero of a Hundred Unknown Battles," sticks to the now familiar refrain of implausible ignorance that Bush and his advisers have been reciting for three years...
...The New York Times reacted to this preposterous explanation with a derisive editorial headlined "The Iran-Copter Affair...
...I took it and with my own hands, cleaned Che's face, closed his eyes, and tried to close his jaw...
...A key to unlocking those mysteries would be "Max Gomez," whose real name, it turned out, is Felix Rodriguez, if only this Cuban exile and former CIA officer ever really told his story...
...On the morning of the invasion, this "CIA hero of a hundred unknown battles" went to church for communion and then returned to his apartment where he stayed for the next three days, occasionally watching television broadcasts of his colleagues' capture...
...There were stains on the army fatigue trousers I was wearing—Che's blood caked dark against the khaki-green material...
...Rodriguez was also close friends with Donald Gregg, who had been one of his CIA superiors in Vietnam and then was Vice President Bush's national security adviser...
...Our ideals are different...
...As his own memento, Rodriguez has often displa3) ed Che's Rolex watch, which he has claimed in the-past was a gift from the guerrilla leader before his death, as a gesture of respect...
...You used to be a minister of state in Cuba...
...We talked for a long time—not about strategic matters but about Cuba, and communism, and about our different philosophies of life," Rodriguez writes...
...Rodriguez quotes himself as telling Che, "Commander, I didn't come to interrogate you...
...It was a holy war, a crusade...
...Ile looked at me for some seconds, wondering whether I was being sincere...
...Born in 1941, he grew up as the only child in a middle-class family, which had some social ties to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, who is depicted as a not-that-bad caudillo...
...An Argentine national, Che saw himself as an internationalist revolutionary who left Cuba after Castro's victory to create "one, two, many Vietnams" in Africa and South America...
...On my wrist was his steel Rolex GMT Master with its red-and-blue bezel," Rodriguez recounts...
...General Paul Gorman, from his view as head of the Southern Command in Panama, clearly doubted Rodriguez's claim to be only an adviser to helicopter-borne Salvadoran counterinsurgency forces...
...The attack was a precedent for later freelance Cuban terrorism and not that different from the Nicaragua harbor mining, which earned the United States the censure of the World Court...
...Gregg himself has struggled to explain that contra reference, which directly undercuts the Bush office's claim of total ignorance about Rodriguez's contra activities...
...While most of us cope with a world clouded in the grays of moral ambiguity, Rodriguez sees only the black-and-white struggle against communist evil...
...After they left, I called a soldier to bring me a pail of water...
...He was an anti-Castro Cuban exile, a dedicated veteran of the CIA's globe-straddling wars against communism, and a man who indeed had met personally with George Bush...
...He joined CIA-sponsored sabotage teams that continued hit-and-run attacks on Castro's island...
...But as Castro tightened security, the infiltrators faced greater and greater danger...
...As the doomed plane spun wildly out of control, an unemployed Wisconsin construction worker and onetime CIA cargo handler named Eugene Hasenfus, struggled to the open cargo door, pushed himself clear, and parachuted safely to earth, the only survivor of the four-person crew...
...Rodriguez insists that he rejected Enders's advice at the time and continued keeping Gregg in the dark...
...While working for the Venezuelan secret police, DISIP, Posada obtained "some juicy tapes" of Andres Perez "engaging in an animated, Xrated conversation with his girlfriend," Rodriguez asserts, and the president simply "was determined to get revenge...
...Indeed, the book opens with Rodriguez in a helicopter that has Che's body strapped to one of the skids...
...He was facing death with courage and grace...
...Gregg had helped place Rodriguez in El Salvador and talked to him frequently by phone while the Cuban exile was managing the air resupply operation...
...Rodriguez said a Bolivian soldier had removed the watch from Che's wrist, but the quick-thinking CIA man took the watch from the soldier, turned around and quickly switched the straps with the one on his own Rolex and handed the Bolivian his timepiece, keeping Che's for himself...
...The killing of the captain of the Sierra Aranza:u would come to symbolize the clumsy violence that has been substituted too often for American foreign policy in Latin America...
...But to Rodriguez and his fellow zealots, who insist they love freedom and democracy, violence inflicted on outsiders and innocents is simply part of the price that sometimes must be paid for prosecuting the "holy war" against communism...
...Rodriguez devotes long passages to justifying the execution of fabled Latin revolutionary "Che" Guevara...
...Despite the implausibility of Gregg's explanations, the Senate, eager to move past the Iran-contra unpleasantness, approved his nomination last September...
...But like Rodriguez, he claims to have kept his mouth shut...
...Increasingly, the anti-Castro Cubans hit softer targets in acts that might be called terrorism...
...Paid full-salary disability, Rodriguez would spend many of the next 13 years working closely with the CIA and international arms dealers on activities that paralleled U.S...
...Enders said he advised Rodriguez to take his complaints to Gregg, not because Enders thought Gregg was involved with the contra program but simply because "Don was the only one I knew" at the White House...
...Rodriguez recounts how he and a friend picked up two women at a bar and spent the night hearing them denounce the new dictator...
...He had reason to be bitter," Rodriguez says of the soldier...
...In my breast pocket, wrapped in paper from my loose-leaf notebook, was the partially smoked tobacco from his last pipe...
...Brian Barger is a Washington writer...
...My mind's eye revisited Uncle Felix Claudio Mendigutia's farm, where I spent summer vacations as a child and ran down to the barns in the morning to splash milk fresh from the cows into my thick, sweet coffee," he writes...
...In a classic display of the administration's arrogance, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams even disputed the existence of "Max Gomez...
...But whatever homespun values guide Rodriguez's life, they are distressingly tolerant of brutality and even terrorism when directed against the communist enemy...
...I no longer hated him...
...Another intriguing tidbit is Rodriguez's disclosure that in early 1986 he told Rudolph Enders, a former CIA superior from Vietnam days, "in vague terms about the North operation" and its corrupt arms dealers...
...Simply by stonewalling and delaying, the administration guaranteed that the public would quickly grow bored and the story would disappear from the front pages...
...Rodriguez is tight-lipped about what he did after his stint with the Argentines, beyond acknowledging that "I spent a fair amount of time traveling through Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica...
...In one botched operation, a planned landing was scratched in favor of an attack on what the infiltrators thought was a Cuban freighter, the Sierra Maestra...
...He found Castro's Cuba not an ironclad police state but a loosely run society where people seemed free to criticize Castro for his faults...
...The blood was real...
...He must have been a good judge of men because he realized I was speaking from the heart...
...Che had a special place in the hearts of romantic leftists around the world—and a different spot in the hearts of Cuban exiles...
...Why Enders did not pass the explosive information on to his good friend Gregg or to his CIA superiors is another one of the hard-to-believe elements of this take-it-on-faith cover story...
...The * The Shadow Warrior...
...Other chapters are devoted to his unsuccessful efforts to organize uprisings against Castro—which were to coincide with the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion—and his later work with the CIA in Vietnam...
...Felix Rodriguez, John Weisman...
...Now look at you—you are like this because you believe in your ideals...
...They were all in it up to their damn eyeballs," Cornick said in a recent interview...
...Hasenfus identified "Gomez" as the CIA man running the secret air force from El Salvador and a personal associate of Vice President George Bush...
...The Che segments of the book are written with an almost surreal quality, with Rodriguez detailing the trophies—a Rolex watch and smoking tobacco—taken from his dead enemy...
...Naturally, Rodriguez insists that Gorman didn't know what he was talking about...
...Like many Cuban exiles, Rodriguez views even mundane political events through the prism of his emotional ties to his lost homeland...
...Although claiming to oppose terrorism, Rodriguez defends a fellow CIA-trained Cuban exile, Luis Posada Carriles, who escaped in 1985 from a Venezuelan prison where he had been jailed for masterminding the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner that killed 73 people...
...One of the anecdotes recounted in the book is the story of how Dominican peasants took literally dictator Trujillo's offer of $1,000 a head for an estimated 250 bearded Cuban guerrillas who had sought to carry their revolution to that neighboring island...
...As Rodriguez walked up a hill taking notes, he heard the shots...
...The Argentine intelligence services were fresh from their "dirty war" of disappearances against homegrown leftists and had just covertly overthrown the elected government of Bolivia...
...The chopper was real...
...Rodriguez says the Bolivians are adamant that Che must be killed but leave the details up to him, even offering Rodriguez the honor of pulling the trigger...
...I have come to talk to you...
...There weren't, we joked, very many Cubans left for the [anti-Castro] Legion to fight against...
...Simon and Schuster, $19.95...
...In pulpnovel style, the book gives Rodriguez's personal recollection of his CIA adventures, including the execution of Ernesto "Che" Guevara after the legendary Latin revolutionary was captured in Bolivia in 1967...
...They contacted Rodriguez for permission to fire on the ship...
...intelligence interests...
...There, on October 5, 1986, a sleepy Sunday morning, a teenage Sandinista draftee aimed a surface-to-air missile at the plane, fired, and watched mesmerized as the missile found its target...
...After skirting Nicaragua's west coast, the C123 cargo plane sliced inland over Costa Rica's rugged jungles and up into Nicaragua...
...I've seen a lot of cover-ups in this town, Rowland," Novak sagely noted...
...In a February 8, 1985 cable, Gorman said, "011ie [North] assures me it was his intention to focus Rodriguez on forces operating elsewhere in [Central America...
...For us, the fight against Castro was an all-consuming passion," he writes...
...In Posada's office police also found Cubana Airline flight schedules and diagrams of targets throughout Latin America that had recently been bombed...
...Rodriguez recalls life before Castro as a kind of bucolic paradise...
Vol. 21 • November 1989 • No. 10
