Felix Rodriguez recounts his CIA career, detailing the failed Bay of Pigs invasion caused by Ambassador Stevenson's resignation and alleging Cuban Colonel Fabian Escalante was a second shooter in JFK's assassination. He describes Vietnam's "Pink Team" tactics, the 1987 Iran-Contra Committee testimony where he denied cartel funding for Contras, and his hunt for Che Guevara in Bolivia. Rodriguez claims Che chose Bolivia for its poverty, refused to be executed personally despite orders, and was killed by Sergeant Teran, an event that left Rodriguez emotionally conflicted while cleaning the guerrilla's body. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Confronting Che Guevara00:09:57
So I stood in front of him and said, Che Gabar, I'd like to talk to you.
He looked at me very arrogant.
He said, Nobody talks to me.
Nobody interrogates me.
So when I saw that attitude, I said, Comandante, I didn't come here to interrogate you.
I'd like to talk to you.
I admire you.
You used to be head of state in Cuba and you're here because you believe in your ideals, even though I know they are mistaken.
He said, Can you untie me?
Can I see?
I said, Sure.
Just before that picture was taken, I put my hand around the chair and said, Comandante, miren el pajito.
Look at the little bird.
Look at the little bird.
So I got into the room.
stood in front of him, he was sitting in the bench, he looked at me, I looked at him.
He said, Commander, I'm sorry, I tried my best.
He's ordered from the High Bolivian Command.
That guy looked at me and he turned white like a piece of paper.
I had never seen somebody whose face turned white, I mean literally white.
It's anything you want for your family.
Tell Fidel that he will soon see a triumphant revolution in America.
And then he changed and said, and you can tell my wife to remarry and try to be happy here.
There's a documentary out there.
In that documentary, they accuse you of being tied to the murder of the DEA agent.
Kiki Camarena.
Kiki Camarena.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, we've been here.
We're with them.
Yeah.
You smoke cigars?
No.
You don't?
Oh, man, I brought you a cigar for you.
I was hoping that we'd get a cigarette.
You never ever smoke cigars?
Nope.
Nor cigarette.
Really?
When I was five years old, my father made me smoke one cigarette.
Your dad made you smoke a cigarette when you were five?
He offered me a cigarette.
I didn't want it, and he forced it on me.
So I got sick.
I vomited.
I hated this.
I never touched it again.
Wow.
That's a good strategy.
I don't know if he did it for that purpose, but he definitely accomplished that.
So, to preface this conversation, I wanted to give some context to how I found out about you.
And that was through a guy named Rick Prado, who was on the podcast.
He was a former CIA paramilitary guy who was based in Honduras.
And another woman who was just on the podcast, Andy Jacobson, who wrote a book called Surprise, Kill, Vanish, all about the paramilitary teams and the assassination, the covert assassination operations that had gone on around the world since.
You know, the beginning of the Cold War.
And you have had a legendary career and life.
So, first of all, thank you for inviting me here to your beautiful museum packed with history.
And for people that are listening who may not know about you, can you give me just like a brief background of where you come from and your military career?
Yes, I come from a small town, Cuba called Santi Espiritus, where I spent all my.
Kids' life.
I was born in 1941.
I went to La Salle School in Santi Espiritus.
Then in 1952, when Batista made a military coup, my uncle was made Secretary of Public Work.
So he moved to Havana, and my mother accompanied him to be able to set up the home for him.
So she took me along with her.
So I spent the first years in La Salle School in Havana.
Then for the second year, I was in the Havana Military Academy.
And then I moved, you know, I used to live in my uncle's home until the next year.
Then they offered me to go to the United States if I wanted to come to school here.
So in 1954, when I was about 13 years old, I moved to Perkiomen Preparatory School in Pennsylvania.
That's where I started in seventh and eighth grade.
And then I continued through my fourth year of high school.
Now, before I completed the sixth year of high school, I wasn't.
December 1959, my parents had gone to Mexico on vacation in late 1958, so I went there to visit them and I spent New Year's Eve with them, and that's when Castro took over.
So I came back to school again.
I was supposed to go to Havana, but because of the situation there, I didn't.
Went back to school and then went back in 1959 to visit my parents in Mexico.
And at that time, there was a Captain Cortez from the Cuban Army who was actually recruiting people for the first operation against Castro that took place.
In the Dominican Republic.
It was called the Anti Communist Legion of the Caribbean.
It was composed of about 100 Cubans, 150 Spaniards, 50 Yugoslavian, 50 Greek, and 50 mixed nationalities.
So when I was actually recruited by this guy as a volunteer, my father didn't want to sign me the paper because I was 17 years old at the time.
So I told him that I was going to forfeit his signature in front of him, and he agreed.
He told me that he would not sign it because he might be signing my death sentence, but he respected my position.
Go ahead and do it.
So, in front of him, I did sign my name.
I got the visa number 60 from the Dominican Republic.
And actually, on the 4th of July of 1959, I flew on a plane from Miami to the Dominican Republic, an airfield that was in the middle of the city called General Andrew, that no longer exists now.
And there I was made by General Pedraza, who was a Cuban general, and taken to his home for a while, spent a week in, well, it was called at the time, Ciudad Trujillo.
And from there, we went to the naval base of Caldera, where we started training there.
I was 18 years old by the time.
And they were training there until they were supposed to be the first attempt to overthrow Castro.
Cuban mayor, Eloy Gutierrez Minoyo, claimed that he had taken over the city of Trinidad and invited the people from the Dominican Republic to support them with weapons and military personnel for training.
So people in the Dominican Republic believe him.
He was actually working for Castro.
We didn't know that.
So there was a plane who was supposed to go there with a lot of weapons.
Was he working for Castro?
Mm hmm.
You said he was working for Castro?
The mayor who said that he had this defect and he had taken over the city of Trinidad was working for Castro.
Okay, got it.
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And he double crossed the people that we were in the Dominican Republic.
So they were ready to send a plane with about five instructors and plenty of military equipment.
I was supposed to go on that plane.
So there were five of us to go on the plane.
One was Mari Brown, who was a Spanish, who was actually in the French Legion.
The other two were Cuban lieutenants, Lieutenant Rivero and Lieutenant Rodriguez.
And there was Roberto Martín Pérez, who was the son of a Cuban lieutenant colonel in the police, and myself.
We were ready to go in the helicopter to fly from there to San Isidro Air Force Base in the Dominican Republic.
Roberto Martín Pérez' father, who was very close to my family, came to the helicopter and said that I was like a son to him, and his son had much experience that I did, so his son will go and I will go with him when he goes.
He got me out of the helicopter.
I really didn't talk to him for about a week, and then the helicopter actually landed in San Isidro.
They got that C 46 plane that did belong to Batista when Batista left Cuba.
And when he landed in Trinidad, I actually was taken by Castro forces.
All of them were arrested.
The captain took my place.
I wasn't supposed to stay.
My mission was to put gasoline in the plane, oil if needed, and come back to the Dominican Republic.
What happened then is this guy put a defense on the plane, and he was the only one who was killed on the operation.
The other people were captured, and my friend Roberto Martín Pérez spent the next 28 years in a Cuban prison.
Then, after that, they moved our unit to continue training in Costanza.
That's an area up in the mountain.
When I arrived, there were already guerrillas in there that Cuba had sent with Delio Gomez Ochoa, a commander.
And there were Cuban and Dominican people.
And of course, it was put down.
Most of our people fought them.
The Cubans that were there fought against those guerrillas along with the Dominican troops.
And they were able to eliminate all of them eventually.
So, after that, the operation was eventually terminated.
I contacted hepatitis, and my parents went to Dominican Republic to pick me up.
So, I flew back to Miami in December of 1960 59.
I recovered in Miami.
I missed one semester in school.
I went back to school.
I recovered that semester and did graduate in June of 1960 from high school.
I did apply and was accepted at the University of Miami for engineering, civil engineering.
That's what really wanted to be all my life.
Before that happened, we learned there was something going on somewhere in Latin America to liberate our homeland.
So, I decided that was more important.
I joined that, later became the Bay of Peak invasion.
So we were flowing from the Opalaca base airport into Guatemala, and then we started training in Guatemala along with the Brigade 25 of 6.
The Failed Invasion Plan00:15:01
At the time, we had no idea what the CIA was.
I thought, we all thought that there were rich Cuban people who have lost sugar mills in Cuba, putting up the money for this operation.
You had no idea what the CIA was.
We had no idea what the CIA was.
We had no idea that the U.S. government was sponsoring our operation.
It came later on when, you know, everything.
Who did you think was sponsoring the operation when you decided to go to Cuba?
Rich Cuban, a bunch of rich Cubans.
They have lots of sugar mills and things in Cuba.
They have enough money and they were financing this.
So that's what we all thought.
Now we went in there, then the invasion became related to a fiasco.
A lot of people ask why the invasion was put in hand with the CIA and not the Pentagon?
Because the CIA had no expertise in military landing, the Pentagon did.
And the simple answer is it wasn't meant to be a military landing.
When the Eisenhower administration received information in 1960 from their intelligence sources that the Soviets were planning to bring offensive missiles to the island, they decided to destabilize the Castro regime.
So they ordered the CIA to destabilize the Castro regime.
And what the CIA did was they got a very experienced military guy in guerrilla warfare called Napoleon Valeriano.
Is this when Nixon was vice president and Nixon thought he was going to win the election?
Against Kennedy, or when Nixon first, I think Rockefeller dropped out of the race and then Nixon realized he was going to be the primary candidate in the Republican Party.
Yeah, Nixon was the vice president at the time, with Eisenhower.
He was already the vice president.
Yeah, right.
So what else was asking?
Like, Nixon was the vice president and then Nixon wanted to establish a paramilitary team to go into Cuba to destabilize Cuba, right?
Well, I think that was the decision of President Eisenhower, not Nixon.
Okay.
Okay.
I must have thought about that.
He was vice president.
I'm.
By all means, we all know that he did win the election, and the election became fraudulent because the mayor of Chicago, Daley, was the one who committed fraud in that election and gave the election to President Kennedy.
But actually, everybody knows that the election was won by Vice President Nixon.
If they had been honorable, Chicago would have gone for Nixon, and that was the state that gave the presidency to either one.
So, Daley committed fraud, and that's how Kennedy became president of the United States.
His campaign, the people who were running his presidential campaign, they covertly went to all the preachers, to all the churches in like seven or eight major swing states, and they turned them from Republican to Democratic and convinced them all to support Kennedy.
So, in other words, there were these black preachers that were showing all these pamphlets in support of Kennedy in all the churches, and they were able to swing the black vote in like seven states.
To Kennedy.
I don't know what happened there.
I knew that if Daley had not committed fraud, Nixon would have been president of the United States.
The rest, I had no idea that was going on in there.
The thing is, then they contracted this guy who was a colonel, graduated from West Point from the Pentagon, whose real name was Napoleon Valeriano.
He used the name with Joseph Vallejo.
And he had been very effective in the war against the Hawk in the Philippines.
And he started training us as a guerrilla warfare.
Now, there were guerrillas in the Escanbride.
So the idea of the Eisenhower administration was to reinforce that guerrilla to a point that they would be able to control a small territory and declaring independent territory and then.
Bring a provisional government from there and it will be recognized by the OAS and the United States.
That was the end of Castro.
So we formed what was called the infiltration team or the great team or a special force of the brigade.
There were 90 of us, actually, about only 36 of us entered Cuba clandestinely before the invasion.
And there were several what was called black teams of 25 men each who were specialized and received weapons by air and by sea and also military training.
So the idea was that we would go into the country first and start bringing civilians.
Into the Escanbride Mountain.
Once there were enough people in there, they would bring the black team to train them.
And once there was a strong guerrilla that could liberate a small territory, then the rest of the brigade would come protecting a provisional civilian government in arms that was going to promote free and democratic elections within a year.
And of course, it would be accepted by the OAS, Organization of American States, and 90 some percent American troops, maybe a little percent of Latin American troops.
And that was the end of Castro.
That was the idea of the operation.
And was this the same thing as Operation 40?
No.
Operation 40 was a part of the operation of the Bay of Pig with intelligence people who were going to go in to work the intelligence inside the operation itself.
So that was the concept that prevailed.
Now, when President Kennedy was elected president, then he had been extremely critical of Nixon, telling him that he was not doing enough to stop communism in Cuba.
I had no idea that we were already in Guatemala being trained by the Eisenhower administration.
So, when he was confronted with the fact that they already had people in there, he decided to continue with the operation, but he didn't want an operation that was actually planned by Republicans.
So, he decided to continue it, but with a different concept altogether.
They disbanded the black teams.
They formed what is actually a reinforced battalion, not a brigade, even though they call it a brigade.
They took our Filipino colonel out of the operational area.
They brought a guy from the Pentagon.
And they kept us, the infiltration team.
We went additional training after.
December, late part of December, we moved to Panama for additional special training.
And from there in January, we started moving to Miami and infiltrating Cuba in different forms.
There was a group that landed in Cuba by the airport, international airport, with their true name.
And the cover story was they were coming back from American University to support the revolution.
One team parachuted into the island, the Camagüey area.
And 90% of the team entered through navally, through the infiltration through the coast with reception teams.
And one individual entered through the Guantanamo Naval Base, helped by the base and approved by the chief of naval operation there.
And that was the people that were inside Cuba.
So I entered Cuba in late February of 1961 to work with the internal resistance.
Now, while we were operating inside Cuba, we were never told of the invasion coming in at all.
We were not privy of that.
When they decided to invite, we had no idea it was taking place.
Talking about the Bay of Pigs invasion.
We had enough explosives inside the island and enough weapons to be able to blow bridges on the way to the Bay of Pigs and delay the troops coming in, but we were never advised.
And by the time we learned that the invasion had taken place and where Fidel already had thousands of people being arrested, he got all his army going house by house in the main cities of Cuba, especially in Havana.
They surrounded every building.
And if you were a male in age of a military agent, you were not assigned to a military unit, even though you had done nothing.
Maybe you were even raised in the Communist Party.
But if you were not assigned to a military unit, they would pick you up and they put you up in temporary concentration camps.
I could call.
They had a baseball field with high fences.
They were housing 250,000 Cubans from Havana.
There was like Hotel Blanquita called now Carlos Marx, who has capacity for 5,000 people.
It was housing like 5,500 people in there.
So it was really a disaster.
They actually were able to disarticulate internal resistance because most of them were captured.
Even though later on, after everything passed, all of them were liberated because they had no idea who they had.
But at the same time, they were able to disarticulate internal resistance so we could not help the invasion at all.
So, when it failed, a lot of our people were, like, say, members of my infiltration team.
Four of them were executed by firing a squad.
One of them was captured defending a safe house and was also executed.
Then they had five people from Castro's 26th of July who landed.
He had a personal grouch against them.
They were, after being captured, executed by firing a squad.
And there were others that would die, drown, or the other die in training.
Like, for example, our 25 of 6 member, Carlos Rodriguez Santana, he was the first casualty in Guatemala.
He fell from a mountain trying to locate a better place for training, and he was the first casualty.
His brigade number was 2506.
That's why they call Assault Brigade 25 of 6 in his honor, being the first one who was killed.
So, you know, the brigade fought bravely.
The three days that they could, they had weapons for only 24 hours.
The boat that Was sank because we did not control the air.
We were promised the air support.
There were two airstrikes that destroyed 90% of Castro Air Force, but there was a last strike that was supposed to take place with 16 planes that was canceled by Adelaide Stevenson.
And the situation was that Stevenson wasn't briefed on the operation.
He was told that this operation, all the planes that were attacking Cuban targets, were Cuban defector planes.
And that's what he really believed.
And when the first attack, they shot down one of our planes, and Cuban ambassador Raul Roque.
Could present in the United Nations a picture of the B 26 that Cuba had, that had a plastic nose, and then the picture of the planes that were attacking us because they have one down.
They had the A.50 calorie machine gun in the nose, completely different planes.
Then, unless Stevenson told the administration, unless they put a stop to the airstrike, he will resign to the UN.
So they put a stop to the final airstrike, who was really going to eliminate all of Castro's Air Force to convince Stevenson not to resign.
And that was the turning point where we did not control the air.
They sent the boat with all the ammunition, every supply that we had.
And there was no contingency plan.
So the brigade fled bravely for 24 hours.
The ammunition it had extended to 72 hours for 48 hours.
When I got to 72 hours, they ran out of ammunition and they did not surrender, but they had to go into the swamp and most of them were captured.
So during the invasion, right, when you guys were initiating the invasion for the first 24 hours during the Bay of Pigs, did you guys know there wasn't going to be any air support?
Or did you guys think that you had air support coming?
We went in with Havana, we believed we were going to have air support.
And it did take place the first two airstrikes before the invasion.
Now, the third one, who was the most important one, we had no idea it had been canceled because of Adelaide Stevenson.
And that was critical.
That was the airstrike that was going to take out the T 33 jet trainers and the 86 planes.
When they didn't take out that, they were the ones who controlled the air.
On the first day when the invasion landed, they were able to sink the boat, the Houston, who was bringing all the weapons and ammunition, everything.
And there was not a contingency plan by the administration at all.
So, where people fought bravely for the first 48 hours, they took every single position on the first day that were assigned to them.
But then, when they ran out of ammunition, they did not surrender, but they had to get into the jungles.
And then, weeks later, leader by leader, they actually captured over 95% of the brigade.
How many people total?
Oh, they were to where they landed about 1,200 of them, less than 1,300.
Over 1,100 were captured.
They were also, actually, who died in combat was about 76, not more than that.
And the rest of the people who we count like 100 and some people that died, the rest of the people were, there were a boat called Celia who was able to leave with 22 brigade members on board.
Now, we had in front of the Bay of Pigs during the invasion Task Force Alpha from the Navy.
We have the USS Carrier in front of us, Essex, by the name of Essex.
They have all the plane painted black.
It was supposed to participate.
We have several Marine landing craft on board, they have several destroyers, they have two submarines.
The whole task force.
But it was never authorized by the president to participate in it.
As soon as the invasion failed, they picked up a few people and they left.
So, this group, they were able to steal a larger boat, and 22 of the Cuban brigade members were able to get on it.
And they actually drifted all the way through the South Coast into the North Coast.
And they also were picked up two weeks later near New Orleans.
By that time, 10 of them had died from thirst and lack of water.
Who?
And 10 brigade members died during that situation.
And 12 survived.
Then there were also, like I said, the five people that were executed from the infiltration team, the five people that he executed from Fidel's personal unit.
There were several of them who died in the hospital with lack of medical attention.
There were others that died in training before they arrived there.
But the actual toll of the brigade was minimal compared to their losses.
In the Bay of Peak itself, they lost over 100 people.
But then there was what we call La Carretera de la Muerte, the death road.
Where he was coming on the second day with 80,000 militia.
And there were three of our B 26 planes that engaged them.
Now, every plane had eight, five inches of rocket each.
It had 850 cavalry machine guns in the nose, and each one of them would carry a 500 pound bomb or napalm bomb.
And they went through over that column of Castro's troops, and the result was between four to 5,000 casualties between dead and killed.
Castro never talked about that.
Now, we had a paramedic guy who eventually defected, came to the United States.
He wrote a book about it and he made it available to us.
He was at the other end receiving the window and the wounded and the dead.
He's the one who told us that the result was well, he would say it was over 5,000 people that were wounded and killed.
And they had to send it to different hospitals out of the city.
They have to use a basketball field to put the wounded and the dead in there because they have no way to be able to deal with so many wounded and dead people.
Fidel never counted those people who died during the Bay of Peaks.
You only commemorate a hundred and some of them.
So, how long?
You said it took about 24 hours until you ran out of ammunition.
48 hours.
48 hours.
Seeking Political Asylum00:04:31
So, walk me through what was going on.
How old were you?
19.
So, you're 19 years old.
You just invaded Cuba, and it's been 48 hours.
You run out of ammunition.
You have no backup air support.
Do you remember I was in Havana working with the Resistance?
I was not at the Bay of Pigs.
Oh, okay.
Oh, you're in.
Yeah, I entered in Cuba a month and a half before the invasion to work with the Resistance inside.
Okay.
That's what I said.
They never advised us, they never told us of the invasion.
Otherwise, we had enough equipment to be able to blow bridges on the way to Playa Girón and delay the troops going in there.
But when they told, it was too late.
Fidel was already picking up thousands of people in the city, and there was no longer a safe house that would give you a safe passage.
So you were no longer safe?
No.
What did you do at that moment?
Well, I was lucky that the lady who was driving me around had contact with the Spanish embassy.
So here comes Alejandro Vergara with the.
It was actually.
His title was Prince and Propaganda for the Spanish Embassy in Havana, but he was the intelligence officer for the Spanish government in there.
He knew her, who was a Spanish origin, and he came to pick her up to save her at the apartment that we were, they were coming to be checking within the next few minutes.
So I went with them.
So we got into his car, and as we were pulling out, there was a truck with militia surrounding the building where we were.
So we went to his apartment at the Edificio Somellang.
Of course, he had diplomatic immunity.
And there were already eight people hiding in his apartment, sleeping on the floor.
That's where I stayed there for a while.
And it was an amazing situation because his apartment was in 2B, and my grandparents were in 1A of the same building.
So from his apartment, I could see my grandfather and my grandmother on my father's side having breakfast downstairs.
So I tried to contact different safe houses to move because he told me I couldn't stay there too long.
And nobody would answer you.
Everybody was afraid.
Even if they answer you, they will not accept you.
Before people had the, they knew or they thought we were going to win, so they didn't mind taking chances of being picked up because they knew we were going to be out soon after the invasion.
But after the invasion failed, nobody would give us any support at all in Havana.
So I was lucky then that this lady was friends with this guy, Vergara, and I spent about a week in his apartment.
And then eventually they took me to the Venezuelan embassy where I did seek political asylum.
So this Venezuelan embassy where I live was a big house from one of the rich people of Cuba, Mestre, who owned the CMQ. Television station in Cuba.
And it was a huge job for a big family, but not to be able to lodge 120 people in there.
So we were 120 people living in one home.
I had a big jar.
Can you imagine?
There were fights after a while.
We had to make crews to cook and to clean the house.
And I slept in a room with 20 some people in the dining room on top of chairs.
It was really not easy.
And I had to spend there five and a half months before they factionally.
Finally, we were able to seek political asylum papers to be able to leave the country.
Was this guy not concerned?
Was he not worried at all about harboring you guys in his house?
No, there is a treaty that is signed by all Latin American countries in general, with the exception of the United States, Canada, and Dominican Republic.
Trujillo never signed that treaty.
If you are a national from, you have to be a national from that country specifically that you are asking for political asylum.
If you are being persecuted politically and you can prove that, they will give you political asylum protection.
And the government is compelled to give you a safe conduct out of the country in a reasonable time.
Now, the Cubans interpret a reasonable time any way they want it.
It's supposed to be a few days, maybe a week.
In my case, they hold it for close to five and a half months before they will allow me to leave.
I had to leave there.
Then eventually they give you a safe condo to leave the country.
So on the 13th of September of 1961, that's when I left from the Venezuelan embassy in a plane with another 100 and some people to Caracas, Venezuela.
And then I stayed in Caracas for about a week.
I did have contact with the agency there.
They provided money for my ticket.
My mother, while I was in the embassy, was able to say my Cuban passport, who had a student visa on it.
Evading Capture in Miami00:02:24
So I used that student passport with visa to be able to get into the United States at the very end of the month of September.
Now, the main thing is they contacted me again, and before the October month was over, I already was going back to Cuba only for intelligence purposes.
I made seven trips to Cuba after the Bay of Pigs.
Bringing people material in and out during that time.
And you were doing this by boat or plane?
By boat.
No, it was all by boat.
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So after you got into Caracas, after you escaped Cuba, did the CIA contact you at all?
Did you contact them?
What was the communication?
I found out a way to contact them.
One guy who worked at the Maiketia Airport who was in contact with the agency.
And I contacted and explained my situation.
He was the one who provided the ticket.
And everything, arranged for everything for me to fly out of Caracas for Miami.
So when we landed here, the normal procedure was they would pick us up and take off to Apalaca for debrief for about three or four days.
It's sad because I lost there my passport, they should have given it back to me, but they kept my Cuban passport.
They never gave it back to me.
Kennedy's Assassination Plot00:08:08
And then after that, of course, the agency already knew that I was there and they were part of the debriefing.
So from there, it continued to work with them back and forth.
And I worked with the agency like that.
Shook the hand of President Kennedy when he visited the Orange Bowl at the end of 1960.
Oh, really?
Too, yeah.
He was, that's when the brigade gave him the flag, allegedly that was at the Bay of Pigs.
Kennedy accepted the flag in custody and he promised that day that he will soon return the flag in a free Havana.
He meant it.
I honestly believe that he meant it and I believe that's why he was assassinated in Dallas.
He darn well knew that if he didn't assassinate, Castro knew he didn't assassinate Kennedy.
Kennedy was going to assassinate him.
And it was true.
The president was planning the assassination of Castro after that for sure.
Wait, say that one more time.
Fidel Castro knew if he didn't assassinate Kennedy, Kennedy was going to assassinate him.
Oh, got it.
Okay.
Okay.
It was a matter of, he knew that.
And that's why he was, I'm convinced he was part of the assassination of the president in Dallas.
And we know that there was a Cuban captain, Fabian Escalante, who was a perfect shooter and a sharpshooter.
He spoke fluent English.
And we all knew that he was in Dallas that day.
Then he was the second shooter.
And then he left for.
For Mexico and from there to Cuba on private planes.
So, you don't think it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone?
No, I think Arpic Alps was one of the shooters, but I am convinced that this guy, Fabian Escalante, was the second one.
That's the famous bullet that is impossible to be able to trace because there was another shooter.
Now, at that time, the Johnson administration knew and they had information from the Bureau of the Participation of the Cubans in the Assassination of the President.
But for national security consideration, they had to cover that up because if they had to recognize at that point in time that the president of a foreign Government with like Cuba assassinated the president of the United States, they had to invade Cuba.
And they knew they were already inside Cuba for offensive missiles.
Cuba was able to sneak in four offensive nuclear missiles into the island.
I guess that's why when Khrushchev knew that we knew that they had been able to put in four offensive missiles, that's when he decided openly to bring those boats full of nuclear.
That was the October crisis that took place.
Cuban Missile Crisis.
What did you think?
What was your opinion of President Kennedy?
I thought that it's a different opinion from brigade members.
A friend of mine here, he believes he's a traitor.
He hates him.
In my opinion, I believe he was a young president, inexperienced and very ill advised.
And we had to pay the price, no question about it.
And he was responsible for it, and he took full responsibility.
But then I believe he tried to amend it, and that got his life.
He was actually, he and his brother wanted to eliminate Castro at all costs.
It was something that they could not help it.
I mean, that was one of the major things he ran on.
During his presidential campaign against Nixon.
No, and he meant it.
See, the fact that what he did after that, he opened the Armed Forces of the United States for the brigade officer.
So there were 212 brigade officers, and I was one of them, who joined the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines in Fort Benning, Georgia for basic training.
And then also opened the Armed Forces of the United States for regular soldiers, for Cubans to join the Army, not only.
In Fort Jackson and all the military bases.
There were thousands of Cubans who joined that.
They were called Unidad Escubada, Cuban units.
We were training for, like I say, for being a second lieutenant, 212 of us.
And then he started organizing the assassination of the president.
Actually, we graduated after eight months from the training they gave us, which was called a special officer training program.
They had to call it that because we were already second lieutenant, but the block of training was.
Based on the OCS, Officer Candidate School that they give to sergeants, which are going to be promoted to second lieutenant.
But they could not call it OCS because we were already officers.
So they used the same block of training, but called it SOTP, Special Officer Training Program.
So when I graduated from that program in late, I think it was like October or November, before November, it was in September or October, we graduated from the program.
I was supposed to go to Fort Halliburton, Virginia to take intelligence training.
But before that, our team came to visit me in Forbending and they asked me to resign my commission and to join him in a special operation that was sponsored by President Kennedy to eliminate Castro.
And then he told me this time we are going to be the one in charge.
We are going to be commanding this special operation.
Either we win or we lose on our own.
They are going to give us everything that we need.
All right?
Last time we trusted the Americans, we did not participate in any planning of the operation.
This one, we were going to do all the planning.
And he wanted me to resign to be his head of communication.
I told him, I said, Manolo, what guarantee do I have that President Kennedy is behind this?
He said, What guarantee do you want?
I said, Well, you want me to leave the army and go to a motel and being trained by the CIA in communication?
Tell your source, whoever it is with the administration, I want to be trained in forbidden in full uniform of the U.S. Army, being paid by the U.S. Army.
If they do that, then I'll resign my commission and go with you.
So he told me, fine, go and see your supervisor and ask him if you want to take a special communication training.
So here I go and see Mayor Angel Torres, who was a Puerto Rican in charge of our training of all the Cubans.
What was his name again?
Angel Torres.
Angel Torres.
So I went to him and said, Mayor, you know, Lieutenant Rodriguez, I'd like to change to a special communication training.
So he looked at me and his office and said, Look, Lieutenant, first of all, as far as I know, there is no such thing as special communication training.
Second, if it were, It's too late to change.
You are going to Fort Halloway in Virginia for intelligence training.
And third, who told you?
Sir, I cannot tell you.
He threw me out of his office, which was normal.
So we left Fort Benning.
We went to Miami for vacation before we went back to Fort Benning to pick up our things to continue on to intelligence training.
I was supposed to go when I received a call from Aurora Street, which is the recruiting center in Coral Gable, to ask me to call Major Torres immediately.
So I called Major Torres in Fort Benning, and the first thing that he told me is, Lieutenant Rodriguez, come to Fort Benning immediately.
We have here Mr. Musa and Mr. Flanagan to give you your special communication training.
So I enlisted two other members from the brigade, Luis Sierra and Jorge Giro, to go with me.
We all went back to Fort Benning.
We were given an empty building inside the military base, and they got these two guys, Mr. Musa and Mr. Flanagan, from the CIA in civilian clothes, who gave us a month and a half of communication training, and they assigned to us a sergeant from Puerto Rico origin, whose last name, by the way, was Castro.
To do the translating, because I did not speak English because I went to school here, but the other two didn't.
So we had this guy, Castro, to do the translation for us.
And after we finished the training, we did resign to our officer commission, and we went with Artemis to Central America.
He had enlisted the president of Costa Rica and the president of Nicaragua, Somoza and Chico Orlich from Costa Rica.
And we had like three bases in Nicaragua a naval base, a commando base, and an infiltration team base.
And guerrilla base.
Then in Costa Rica, we had a communication training base and infiltration team base, both with the full support of both presidents.
And we started training and the operating of that operation.
Infiltrating Central America00:03:58
Then, unfortunately, President Kennedy was assassinated.
When you were down there?
Then, because of the respect that they still have for Bobby Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy was our direct contact with the CIA.
Our team had dealt directly with Bobby Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy was the guy who contacted the CIA on our behalf.
We received, for example, all the weapons we received down there came in a huge barge that was towed all the way from Hamburg, Germany, a U.S. military base, army base.
It was given to us in the ocean.
We had the M16.
The M16 was experimental at that time.
The U.S. Army was still using the M1 Garand.
We were given the M16, the original one.
We were the ones who told the agency that this thing, whenever it got stuck in mud, didn't work.
It was a.
The AK 47 was much better.
This thing got stuck whenever it got in mud.
That's why they then added up that plunger on the right side that you push it in when that happened.
Oh, okay.
If you got in mud, they would push it forward and then it would continue to operate.
But we were the ones who told them about that defective that the M16 had.
Oh, wow.
We had a 20 caliber machine that we were using.
We had a huge 200 and some boat as a mother boat.
We had two swift boats that were normally used in Vietnam that came out from being built in New Orleans.
We had a B 20 boat, and we have all kinds of armament from 20, 30 caliber machine, a 50 caliber machine, and 20 millimeter machine.
I mean, anything that we needed, plenty of explosives and everything.
We started an operation doing raids against Cuba during that time.
Now, in 1965, that was as far as Johnson put up with us.
And at that point in time, he completely terminated our operation.
They sent an assistant to President Kennedy, who was his assistant, whose name was Joseph B. Califano Jr.
And he came to visit the people in the army.
And they told them, on behalf of the president, that the promise of President Kennedy to liberate Cuba died with President Kennedy.
And there was no longer a commitment from the United States president to liberate Cuba.
If you wanted to stay and make a career in the armed forces, you're welcome to it.
But be knowing there is no longer a compromise to liberate Cuba.
So some of our people left, they went to civilian life, and some continued in the military career.
A lot of them became later on and retired as full colonels, lieutenant colonels.
One of them, Oliva, who was deputy commander of the brigade, rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Washington National Guard.
Upon his retirement, he got his second star.
So he retired as a major general from the U.S. Army.
And most of our people, maybe 10 or 15 officers, retired, full colonels, lieutenant colonels, majors, and some captains.
We had three brigade member captains who died fighting in Vietnam.
And we have their picture, honor their picture here, and the picture of all the people who participated in the armed forces at that time.
So that was really a disaster, unfortunately.
Then after that failure, I came back to Miami.
I have met my wife in Cuba when I was 15 years old and she was 18.
First time I saw her, I told myself she's going to be my wife.
Really?
Yes.
I was stunned when I saw my wife.
She was three years older than I was when I was 15.
So when I infiltrated to Q, I exchanged letters with her when she was going to Virginia Intermont College in the United States, maybe three or four letters.
Then when I infiltrated Q, I went to visit her at her home in Havana, but she wasn't home.
She was in Cienfuegos, where she is from.
So when she came back, it was in early 1962, I went to visit her.
And within six months, we were married.
So we got married on May 25th.
She's still my present wife.
We are going to our 63rd years of marriage.
Parachuting into Peru00:07:23
That's impressive.
We have 62 already.
When I got married to her, I told her I was going to leave the agency and everything.
I was going to make a civilian life with her.
But I want her to understand if there was something serious about liberating Cuba, that I will go.
What did she think about that?
Well, she made a mistake of accepting to that.
She agreed to it.
She did.
So this is what happened.
Here we are.
We got married 25 of August.
I started working in a company called Ace Letter Service, $1 an hour.
There were companies that did propaganda for the whole hotel in Miami Beach, which only opened about four months of the year during winter only.
The rest of the year, the hotel in Miami Beach were closed.
And then from there, my uncle was able to get me a better job in a company called Tobin Packaging Company that had to do with meats and hemp and things like that.
I was making, instead of $1, $1.35 an hour.
Now, while I am working at Tobin Packaging Company, I received a call in October from Tom Klein, who was one of my case officers from the CIA, and he asked me, he wanted to meet me when I finished my work at the parking lot of the Howard Johnson across from the University of Miami.
So I arrived a little bit after 5 o'clock in the afternoon in my little car.
He had his big car in there.
I sat in his car and he looked at me very serious.
He said, Felix, the Marines are going to land in Cuba and we need you.
I look at him and say, Tom, if the Marines are going to land in Cuba, what the hell do you need me for?
He said, Well, you know how to operate a radio beacon.
That's a signal you can set up somewhere to be able to direct the plane to a specific location.
They will get to that beacon, and then whatever target it will be very close to, it will be very easy for the plane to hit the base with precision.
So he told me, I'll allow you to parachute behind a Soviet missile base near Santa Clara area and then set up this radio beacon, a pre located determined position we will give you so that our Air Force won't hit with precision the airbase.
So, I agree.
I could not even call my wife.
She waited for three hours in downtown for me to pick her up.
She finally got a bus to our apartment.
I was put in a safe house and asked for two other friends of mine who came to be three of us in the team.
My only basic training was they put an instructor in parachute.
And what they did, they had different tables of different altitude, which would jump from the three points of contact.
We didn't break a leg.
So, we practiced that high altitude, low.
Yeah, one table will be this low, and then it will be much, much, much harder.
Oh, okay.
Close to that high in there.
Okay, close to that thing up there.
Then you have to jump and do the three points of contact, you don't break a leg.
So we did practice that during the time that we were there.
How high is the plane flying when you jump out?
It would probably be about 600 feet.
You don't even carry an emergency parachute.
And you only deploy that high?
No, no, no.
They want me to.
When you are coming down the parachute, you're coming real fast.
Right, right.
Okay, so when you jump from that altitude, it's about as fast as you're coming down with your parachute on.
So, unless you are a professional, you can do like this, you know, and then let it go, and you can, you know, people that actually walk, that's for professionals.
Right, right.
When you're coming down with a paratroop without doing that, you come at that speed.
If you jump from there, it will be the same speed you were coming down with a parachute on.
So, you have to be able to have the three point of contact so you don't break your legs.
Right, okay.
And that's what we're practicing there.
Wow.
But then, Cruise Shave back down the day that the plane was coming to take us to parachute into Cuba.
The operation was terminated, so I was no longer working with the agency.
I lost my job at Tobin Packaging Company, so I continued to work with the agency.
And then from there, that's when we joined after the operation.
What do you continue to do for the agency for work?
No, no, after that, that's when we went into the army.
The army?
Okay.
Yeah, after I was out, then in 1966, I went to Venezuela with a special communication team to set up a communication system for the CIFA, Service Información Fuerzas Armadas.
Was an intelligence server from the Venezuelan army.
And also helped them with communication gear that they had problems with in the jungle when their special unit called the Cazadores was fighting the Cuban guerrillas in there.
That's when Captain Ochoa, who later was executed as a colonel in Cuba, he was the one who was handling the guerrillas in Venezuela with Cubans and Venezuelans.
Then I came back to the United States again.
Then in 1968, they sent me, at the beginning, they sent me to Peru.
Excuse me, they sent me first to Ecuador, which we trained an intelligence unit for the presidency of Ecuador at that time.
At that time, I had the rank of captain as a U.S. Army captain, which is another name.
Attached to the US Embassy there.
Then from there, they sent me to Peru, was a paratrooper unit called the 48 Comandancia Guardia Civil.
There's only two paratrooper units in the world.
I think one is in Peru, and the other one is in Canada.
The only other police unit that has paratrooper capability.
So I went there, the special forces already left when I arrived.
They already trained them in how to rig in the parachute and everything.
And I became an advisor to that unit.
I recall when I first arrived, the commander of the unit, Danilo Agramonte, He asked me if I was a paratrooper.
And out of embarrassment, I said, Yes, sir.
He said, How many jump?
I said, 100.
I never jumped from a plane.
But I was embarrassed to tell him I was his advisor and I was not a paratrooper.
So he asked me if I would jump with them that afternoon, Sunday.
I said, Yes, of course.
So I called a friend of mine whose name was Davier de Vincenzi and said, How the hell do you put this thing on?
I said, You have never jumped?
I said, No, you're not.
You're going to get killed.
I said, Bullshit.
I practiced already, you know, the three point of contact, like, do that.
So I went to my room.
Then we went to the dining room in my coaching there and we practiced jumping from different altitudes.
So I jumped with them 13 times.
I got my wing from the Peruvian Air Force for Guardia Civil.
Now, I was supposed to be there two years, but within several months, there was the military coup of Velasco Alvarado against constitutional president Bela Hundetterri.
And actually, our unit was not in agreement with the military coup.
The commander of the unit called for us, he asked for a plane for training, and he gathered all of us.
The idea was that we were going to take over the plane with full military gear and force the pilot to drop us on top of the presidential palace.
To regain the control of the presidency for the constitutional president, Bela Hunde Terry.
But the army never released the Air Force plane that was assigned to us to do some training.
At the end, about 12 o'clock at night, the director of the police, General Barrios, he knew that they had consolidated the military coup, so he agreed, went along with it.
So the army that was surrounding us from the Peruvian army, they just went back.
So when we came to this country for vacation, they terminated.
Actually, our participation in there because Velasco Barrao started buying all the equipment from the Soviet Union and went completely to the other side.
So they stopped the military assistance to Peru.
Volunteering for Vietnam00:04:08
Then in late '69, volunteered to go to Vietnam.
They had me had a meeting with the chief of the station from Venezuela who wanted me to go there and be an advisor to a 10,000 police unit.
And then they called me and said, Look, both people want you for you to select.
Tom Polgar in Venezuela wants.
You to go there to be an advisor to this police unit, and Ted Shackley in Vietnam wants you to go to Vietnam.
I say, Well, if you believe I will do better in Venezuela, I will go there.
But the same to you, I'd rather go to Vietnam because I've never been in that part of the world.
So they were glad to give it to me.
Not many people were volunteering to go to Vietnam at that time.
When did you meet Billy Waugh?
No, it was later on in training.
Much later, okay.
Yeah, in bases here.
Oh, okay.
We never coincided in the field.
Oh, okay.
So that's why I bought my home in late 1969 because I didn't want to leave my wife in a rented place.
That we bought a house, we still have, here in between Miami Shore and North Miami.
And then I went to Vietnam in early 1970.
I spent in Vietnam from 1970, 71, and 72, two and a half years.
Now, the agency tour is a year and a half, which I completed and then extended for another tour.
When I first arrived, I was assigned to Military Region 3.
Vietnam is divided into four military regions.
The I Corps, that they call Military Region 1, that's where Da Nang is, that's close to the North Vietnamese border.
The second one next to it is Natrang, the second military region.
And guess the most important one is the one that I was, the third military region or three corps, which is 11 provinces around Saigon.
And then they call the fourth military region, which is where you have Kanto, that's where you have the delta, you know, the delta area with the swamps.
And then they call Saigon Region 5.
It's not a region, it's only a city.
But they used to call it Saigon Region 5, which is not a region at all.
But we were the ones surrounding and responsible for Saigon with 11 military units around it.
The PRU was called a Provincial Reconnaissance Unit.
It started with another name many years ago.
And then they changed for Provincial Reconnaissance Unit.
It was a military unit that was totally paid and controlled by the CIA with our intelligence to conduct operations against the Viet Cong in the different areas that we were.
We had PRU in all four military regions.
Now, I commanded the military region of Region 3 and the one from Region 4 from Canto in that area.
We had to advise them.
The biggest unit was the one in Tainin, with about 180.
PRU.
The smallest one was one of the rooms I was about 40 some 60 people.
We had different units, different sites which we paid, we advised, and we tasked them with intelligence besides the one that they generated themselves.
Now, my main objective or really challenge was to stop, they asked me to stop the rocketing of Saigon and stop the rocketing of the boat coming into Saigon.
At the time I arrived, every single week of the month, there was one or two 122 round Soviet rockets who would land.
In the Saigon area.
They always tried to point to the American embassy and to the presidential palace, but they hardly ever hit it.
But it was a psychological operation to be able to say that the United States, with half a million troops in country, could not stop the rocketing of Saigon.
So it was a challenge for the government to do that.
And also, they were having boats coming through the river all the way to the city of Saigon, and they were always attacked on the side by units from the Viet Cong called SAPR.
SAPR is like our special forces in the Viet Cong.
And they could not stop it.
They would have always an escort for Navy Sea Wolf gunships coming to the river, and they saw the explosion, they shit the hell out of the area, and they never got anybody.
So, that was one of my main ideas, my main target that was given to me, challenge to be able to stop the rocketing of Saigon and the rocketing of the boat coming to Saigon, besides other operations that I conducted throughout the region.
Battling the Viet Cong00:10:03
So, were you riding around in helicopters looking for.
Yeah, what I did, I implemented the Army had a concept called Pink Teams.
What they did, they had a huge 500 helicopter flying at three top level.
With no intelligence in general area where they knew the Viet Cong war, whenever they took fire from the enemy or they saw the enemy, they would drop a smoke grenade and they would be gunships shooting the hell out of the area.
And then they continued to another area.
What I did, I took that type of a concept and implemented.
First of all, I went with intelligence.
They didn't go like they did.
When I was going to an area, I knew they were going to be there.
And then I did the same thing.
I went with the huge 500T top level and found them or took fire from them, marked it, then the gunship would hit it, then I'd come back again, and then we bring troops.
But they never did.
We bring troops into the area to pick up the result with dead people or weapons or whatever documents, and we pick that up.
We added that to the concept.
It's what's called Corporaciones Relampagos, you know, that lighting operation.
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Now back to the show.
So we at Tarot Brading and that.
Now, I was lucky as hell to be able to stop the rocketing of Saigon.
The thing is, we never look at the right place.
There was an area where they were staying, and we never went there.
Why?
Because the water tide will come down like 15 feet high.
Nobody will be able to be and live with 15 feet high of water coming up and down.
So I was able to capture in the operation, I don't know why he was going out of that area, a quack who was the bodyguard of Tutank.
Tutank was The commander of that specific unit was attacking Saigon.
He was a lieutenant colonel in the Viet Cong area.
And then this guy, he was very pissed off at them because he was the only male in his family.
What the North Vietnamese did when they were losing Viet Cong in the South, they would replace them with North Vietnamese army soldiers.
That's why it would never end it because if you lose 10 people here, there are thousands of people coming through the Ho Chi Minh Trail with different capacities.
And they have contact through all Vietnam with different military units of the Viet Cong in size.
Hey, we need 10 guys, we need five, we need 15, and they will be refurnished.
So you kill 10 and in the next 10, 20 days, you have another 10 taking those people's place.
It was a never ending situation.
So when I arrived, there were Viet Cong.
When I left, there were no Viet Cong.
There was all North Vietnamese army in those Viet Cong positions.
So this guy told us and said, Look, I was the only one.
Normally, what they do, there are big families, Vietnamese families, they go to a home in North Vietnam.
And if there are maybe five males, they take four and they always leave one to be able to attend to the family.
This guy was the only son.
They got like five sisters.
And because they needed him, he was a paramedic in the Habak province around Hanoi.
They took him.
So he was mad because they left his mother and his sister with nobody to help them.
He was not very happy what he was doing.
So he was extremely cooperative.
And then through an interpreter, he told me, You are looking at the wrong place.
This is the area where they are.
I said, How come the 17th?
Foot of water come up.
I said, Well, they have 55 gallon drums, one on top of the other that they solder high enough that the water won't get to them.
When the water starts coming up, they go on top of that on the trees and they sit there.
What?
And then they leave there.
Then, when the water comes down all the way, they will run down.
They take the 122 millimeter rockets, they go over the river, they shoot into Saigon, they go right back and go up in this five gallon drum truck up there, and they leave there.
So imagine with that information, plus he gave us the general area where the areas were.
We were with him in the helicopter, and of course we waited until the tide went down all the way, and then we went in the helicopter at tree top level.
They were running around, and because it was mud, you could see his feet going different.
So it was very easy to find them.
So we started eliminating them, and then on the 4th of December of 1970, we had a big combat with Tutank himself and his main group near a small river in there.
And we were able to kill like 17 of them, including Tutank, including the commander.
I recall because we went down there that we had people badly wounded.
I went in with one of the helicopters, and I recommended the pilot.
His name was Bruce Bumberger, he was a warrant officer from the Army.
For a decoration, he received a medal for that.
Because that guy landed under heavy fire and he wouldn't move until we bring these three bodies into the heli.
I picked up one, two other of my Vietnamese picked up the other three.
We brought all three into the helicopter thinking they were wounded.
By the time we arrived to the 34 evacuation helicopter, they were all dead.
They were all dead.
But we were able to disarticulate that.
From that day on, there was not a single rocket to hit Saigon until after I left.
We had to continue because they continued to bring people.
They didn't give up.
They continued to bring rocket, bring personnel, and we continued to eliminate them.
And then I picked up a sapper, one of the special units was doing the rocketing of the boat in Saigon and going up to Saigon.
And I found out that in his backpack he had a green electrical wire, it's about 60 meters long.
And then we interrogated the guy.
And another thing, we had an advantage.
A lot of our PRU were former Vietcans that we had recruited.
Oh, really?
And they were also compromised to a point that we trusted this guy more than the normal guy from the street because he knew they were crossed then and they knew he would never be able to go back.
So, most of them, even when we pick up somebody, some of them maybe knew him and worked with him in the past.
It was easy to work with those people in there.
Yeah, there was a guy that was like a double agent, right?
That they took him out and they killed him.
And there were a couple guys, army officers that were out there.
Yeah, maybe they were CIA.
That had nothing to do with my operation.
That was a different thing.
Yeah, but I mean, that was like very.
A big concern there was like people from the Viet Cong who were being spies.
No, this guy was our people, never we had a defect from our troops after we recruited them the way we did.
So, this guy told us that he would set up a rocket on a platform pointing at the middle of a boat going by.
Then they just they lined a string at the line 60 meters away with an electric activator, and then they had a point of reference given to them.
So, they knew when the boat hit that point of reference, the rocket ran in front of the boat.
Then they activated.
So, what happened is there was a big explosion here where the rocket came out, the gunship will hit that area.
They were not there.
They were 60 meters on one side or the other.
So, what I did, I asked the commander of the unit, Commander William, who was the commander of Nav Bay Naval Base, to bring the pilot of the gunships.
They were the Seawolf gunships escorting these people, a bunch of the pilots, in one helicopter next to this area on the river.
And I set up one of my PRU with a red smoke grenade in the middle.
Then we measured that cable.
60 meter, and we put a red smoker, a yellow smoker, or a yellow smoker in the middle, and a red smoker on both sides.
So they can visually see more or less the different explosion where the people were.
So, from there on, whenever they saw the explosion here, they would shoot the shit out of the area on both sides, because you know what side they were.
They were able to eliminate eight teams, and they had no idea what was going on.
And they stopped the rocketing of Saigon.
That's what I got from the commander of the Vietnamese Navy, got the Naval Medal of Honor from him.
And for stopping the rocketing of Saigon, I got what they call it, similar to our Medal of Honor for the Army.
It's called the Gold Medal.
Cross of gallantry with gold star.
That's the highest that they give.
Then I have one of that, I have two silver stars with them and six bronze stars during my whole time in Vietnam in there.
But it was extremely effective the way we run the operation with them in Vietnam.
Now, during that time, there was an Argentinian general who visited Vietnam in late 1972.
In late 70, pardon, in 1971, he visited because Giva station in there was.
The chief of station in Argentina.
He was a very prominent general.
Tomas Armando Sanchez Bustamante was the head of the First Army Corps in Buenos Aires, number two to the president.
The president was a military one, Alejandro Agustin Lanuse, who was a military president.
So they asked me to translate for him, and not only that, they asked me to give him a tour of the military region, explain what we were doing there, which I did.
Hijacked Flight to Cuba00:13:22
So only one day I spent with him.
Then they called me the next day and said, Look, General de Bustamante went to the See Ambassador Bunker and he asked him, he wants you to be his advisor in Buenos Aires.
We told him that you were still here, but if he really wanted you, he could request you later on from our embassy in Buenos Aires.
So a thing went by.
I had several helicopter accidents, shot down five times in Vietnam.
My back was in real poor shape.
You got shot down five times?
Yeah, my back was in really bad shape.
I could hardly walk at one point in time, so they decided to evacuate me in 1972.
I didn't complete my three years in Vietnam, two and a half or less.
And then I flew to Washington.
They had doctors who see me and everything.
And then they told me that the general had asked me by name to go to Buenos Aires to be his personal advisor at the First Army Corps.
And they were interested in me to go because he was the highest, after the press, he was number two guy.
And they didn't have anybody in that position.
They created a slot for me.
And they said, okay, we're going to give you a waiver for your back problem.
You have to go to Panama for checkup every six months.
And you can take the family with you.
That's the first time I ever take my family with me.
So, my wife and I and my two kids, we all flew to Buenos Aires in the late 1972.
And actually, what they did now, before that, what happened before Christmas time, when I went to Miami, I was called by Ted Shackley and told me not to fly into Miami because there was a Cuban intelligence officer who defected in Paris and told them that his body, having a drink with him, told him that he was involved in an operation.
To hijack the plane of the Cuban involved in the assassination of Che Guevara.
He had no idea who it was.
To hijack?
The plane of the Cuban who was involved in the assassination of Che Guevara.
So, not to fly into Miami, go anywhere else, but not to Miami.
So, what I. Your plane?
Yeah, the commercial plane.
Right.
So, what I did is they told me not to fly into Miami.
So, I flew into Atlanta, Georgia.
I rented a car.
I drove to Miami from there.
Holy shit.
To spend the 24th of December with my wife.
I spent New Year's Eve with her.
We called Los Reyes Magos on the 6th of December for the kids beside Santi Claude.
And then on the 7th, I drove back to Atlanta.
I had a plane that left Atlanta, Houston, Houston, San Francisco.
And then I had to wait like four hours, five hours in San Francisco to get another plane to go to Hawaii, Vietnam, or Hong Kong, Hawaii, whatever.
I had a cousin who lives there, she's still there.
She's married to another Cuban here in Atlanta.
So she came to say goodbye at the airport.
So I found there was a plane that lived one hour later.
So instead of waiting five hours in San Francisco, I decided only wait four, stay one more hour here with my cousin.
So I changed plane.
Instead of the plane that went from Atlanta to Houston, I got a plane, went to Atlanta, Dallas, Dallas, San Francisco, one hour later.
So I spent with her.
So, when I got to Vietnam that day, nobody was waiting for me at the airport.
So, I took a Lambreta, I went to the Duke Hotel, the CIA hotel.
I changed, I got into the embassy.
And the first guy would look at me and say, What are you doing here?
I said, Hey, I'm supposed to arrive today.
And nobody was waiting for me.
I said, No, no, no.
Your plane that we had in record had been hijacked to Cuba.
And we were finding out what the hell we did to get you out of Cuba.
Wow.
We were very concerned.
That's why when me and my wife went to Argentina, they took our passport, my wife and I.
And they took it to the State Department.
They had all the details right, you know, my name and everything.
But then, place of birth, they put Colorado instead of Cuba.
So, in case our plane was hijacked, they would claim me as a U.S. citizen born in the United States.
Wow.
I still have a copy at home of the passport that said place of birth, Colorado.
That's insane.
And then, when I came back, of course, I tell people, I was a U.S. citizen born here for less than a year.
I was born in Colorado.
Born in Colorado.
So, what year was that plane hijacked?
That was Jack in December from 1971 to 72.
And it was hijacked and it was flown to Cuba.
Yeah.
And whatever happened, did they catch the person who hijacked it?
Do you know what happened with that?
No, nothing.
The face who hijacked it was probably a member of the Cuban intelligence.
He had no problem.
And what about the passengers on board?
Were they all fine?
They probably returned everybody.
The interest was having to get it for you.
And it wasn't there.
That's why I always.
Trouble and imagine this.
What happened was the Cuban had access to the airline to knowing what flight I was going.
If I had not done that and I would have lived from Miami, they have no chance to change planes.
They will probably hijack the plane from Miami because they were able to, if they were able to find out that I was flying from Atlanta, they will never be, but they will definitely find out that I was flying from Miami.
Right, right, right.
What saved me was that I went to Atlanta and I changed plane in Atlanta to stay with her.
Otherwise, I have no reason to change plane in Miami.
I was living the same plane and they probably were taking me.
So, I was really lucky during that time.
Did that make you paranoid at all after that?
No.
No, I believe in destiny.
You believe in destiny?
Oh, yes.
Look, when I was in Vietnam, Ted Shackley, my boss, used to tell people that I had a death witch.
Yeah.
Because the way I conducted myself in operation, believe me, I am no brave like that.
He's not a death witch.
God gave me the conviction that I wasn't going to be hit.
I was convinced.
And no matter what I did, I knew that.
Look, went down five times in a helicopter.
My helicopter was shot with bullets, wriggled with bullets, 40 times at least during the time.
I flew like 300 missions in Vietnam.
40 times at least.
I never touched me.
I had a bullet, I have in my home a fire extinguisher from a helicopter number 38.
The bullet came through close to my leg.
It hit inside the fire extinguisher.
And boy, it was white smoke all over the place in a helicopter.
Everybody thought we were shot down.
I was in El Salvador.
Of course, we fly with no door, so we took the trim out and on the air, we went down.
And I kept the fire extinguisher at my home with the bullet inside the fire extinguisher there.
That's incredible.
I just knew it wasn't going to happen to me.
And it did.
It didn't.
That's super interesting.
That's, I mean, do you think that was the same attitude that a lot of people you worked with had?
Or did you?
I think that was unique to me.
I really believe it was unique to you.
I was, you know, there was a conviction that it's not something that is hard to explain.
I knew, I knew, I knew beyond doubt.
That's why, you know, there should have been a good come up with body if I didn't mind, because I know it wasn't going to hit me.
I didn't.
Wow.
Ever.
I don't have one bullet in my body.
I have people wounded next to me.
Yeah.
Not to helicopter in different places, but I never got a bullet in myself.
Is there.
But it's not bravery.
It was the conviction.
I knew it wasn't going to happen.
It didn't.
Were there any moments that you can think of in all of your tours, everything that you did that you thought you might not make it?
Like, what was the closest you ever came to death?
Not today, well, you could say yes, in Cuba.
That time that I was supposed to leave, you know, the day when they got the house and everybody was executed later on.
Actually, we went to the boat, and the boat wasn't coming that day, didn't come that day.
We had to return back.
On the way back, there were six of us in the car.
There was the driver, who later was the owner of the Supermercado Presidente here in Miami.
We had three members of the Cuban Instituto de Petróleo.
Petroleum Institute in Cuba, who had just performed a sabotage and destroyed 15 oil trucks, fuel trucks.
I mean, they were looking for them for execution, all three of them.
Two of them, I think, they were drivers, one was driver, the other one was security for the area, and they blew up that.
And then one guy came from the guerrilla from the Escan Drive called Diosdado.
He's the only one in the group who had a revolver with five bullets.
And he had one finger missing.
He was shot during combat, he had a typo.
So we are coming back one o'clock in the morning in this car.
And we make a turn, there is a stop of Castro's troop in there, a checkpoint.
Never was there before.
One o'clock in the morning.
We were coming like 120, 140 kilometers an hour.
And the driver said, Why do I go say stop?
It just came to my mind.
I had a big envelope with name written Clarence in black ink.
It was for the CIA guy in Miami.
So I put it in here.
Oh, Jesus.
And we stopped beyond the checkpoint at the speed that we went.
I told the people, look, lower the windows, take the safety out, and if they ask for our documentation, let's try to throw the door to them, try to take the weapon from them.
That's the only thing we can do.
But then on the way by, I put my head out and say, Compañero, pasa algo.
I mean, real strong.
And they look at me and say, No, Compañero, no pasa nada, siga.
And they let us go.
What does that mean?
Yeah, they saw six men inside a vehicle.
And the car was a Chevrolet from 1958, black, similar to the one that the G2, their intelligence service used.
So, the language that I use is the language that they use.
So, they saw six men inside.
So, I guess they probably thought two things.
Maybe they are one of us.
If they are not, and they are stopped, maybe they are a machine and they are going to kill us.
So, they told us to continue.
Now, when I came back on this following two days, which I finally left, the three people from the petroleum thing declined to be taken out by boat.
They all went to different embassies.
When I got to the Venezuelan embassy, one of them was in the Venezuelan embassy.
They didn't want to go through something like this again.
Wow.
If they have, let me tell you, if they had picked us up there, we would have been executed by foreign squads.
Definitely.
Because there were three people from the Escanbride, one person from the Escanbride, three who blew all of this oil for the Cuban government.
And it was me from the infiltration team.
Wow.
So, you know, that was.
So that was early on.
That was tremendous.
That was when you were very young, you encountered.
So you had this.
I was in Vietnam.
I was in Bolivia.
I was 26.
I was less than 30 years old at that time.
Right.
So, but that experience early in Cuba kind of like primed you for all the stuff that you did after.
So, you had experienced, you'd come close, you'd have a lot of near death experiences before that early on in your life when you were very young and you'd experienced lots of death early.
Yeah.
Now, this after Vietnam, I came back from Vietnam.
There was a, well, it was Argentina.
Then, when I came back from Argentina, it was an eventual tour in the Caribbean.
I was what they call an island hopper.
Now, Miami is the only CIA base called station.
You know, the CIA, when they have people in cities, they don't call it station.
Station oversees all of them.
All the cities call it base, like the New York base, the Chicago base, CIA people, San Francisco Bay, Los Angeles base.
Those are bases.
Why do they call Miami a station?
Because Miami is the only one who runs a station out of here.
For example, there is no chief of a station for the Caribbean.
So they have one chief of a station who operates out of Miami.
Got it.
There are different from the Bahamas.
There are different people that we don't have enough people or intelligence to have a personnel in one embassy in those places.
So they run our intelligence capability from the Miami area.
So I took the responsibility of one of those.
I had to take out Dominica, Fort of France, all of those little islands.
We had agents that I had to attend to.
And it was really uneventful.
You know, it was very boring doing.
The only thing that later on I learned was kind of interesting was I was assigned to evaluate a lady in Dominica.
In Rosso, the city of Rosso in Dominica.
And she was a school teacher or something, and very bright, a very black young woman.
I talked to her, we invited her for dinner.
I gave her a very, very high report about her.
When they invaded Grenada, I learned that she had become the prime minister of Dominica, Eugene Charlie.
And she was the head of the coalition who attacked, even though the United States was behind the whole thing, but she was the head of the coalition who attacked Grenada.
Eugene Chardis from Dominica.
I was the one who evaluated her for the agency.
And what did you do to evaluate her?
No, no, I never even talked to her.
I just learned that.
Oh, you just learned it?
Yeah.
I felt shit.
I was the one who gave good word about her to the agency.
Apparently, it came through and they made her Prime Minister of Dominica.
So you weren't really into the spy stuff?
No.
You were more into the combat, the hand to hand, the guerrilla stuff?
In the paramilitary apparatus of the agency, yes.
The Lebanon Mission00:04:49
For example, after that, I had my backpacks in pretty poor shape in 70.
Even today, I have lost.
I can show you my driver's license.
It said that I have 5 feet 11 inches high.
If I have 5'6 now, I have lost so many from the accident, the grinding from the helicopter.
I have missed discs.
I have one vertebra, which is 50% embedded into the other one, and the nerve goes 90 degrees and goes down.
A radiologist took a look at that and said, Look, if I don't see you in front of me, I will look at you in a wheelchair.
You should not be walking.
Now, I can't sit.
I can go in bed fine.
I cannot stand or walk.
It's a tremendous pain in my back.
That's what I have.
I have an electric car.
When I give touring here, I have an electric electric car.
Oh, really?
In there.
Wow.
Because for me to walk is torture.
Well, I mean, the body is one thing, but your mind is still sharp.
You still got it together pretty well.
So, as someone who's been through your body.
When I finished that, I did a couple of interesting things.
The last time that saved my life was I was still with the agency in 75.
I had yet been operated from a hernia.
In my from the Hialeah Hospital, I was in my home recovering, and I got a call from Washington and said, Look, you have to come immediately.
I want you to go to Lebanon.
I said, Look, Lebanon, Lebanon.
I said, Look, Tom, I've just been operated, you know, I just second day in the house.
I don't care, put a you know, put something around, but you have to go and don't tell anything to our chief of station there.
No, he's the boss, he's in Washington.
So, the guy who was chief of station here, Dick, I told him, I said, Look, you know.
I was planning to retire then.
I went to go to the Keys to try to find a job.
Okay, fine.
So I flew to Washington.
They instructed me to go to New York, meet this guy, and go with him to Lebanon.
What happened is the chief of intelligence of the Lebanese army wanted to set up some infiltration, intelligence team to penetrate Hezbollah.
And since I was working in the infiltration team, had the experience, and all of that, they wanted me to help him with that.
And then they Introduced me to this guy, which is well known.
He died already.
Sarkis Gisoganalian.
He was an arm dealer.
He represented at that time the coal industry for the Lebanon army.
Really?
He was the representative of them.
But a lot of people call him the merchant of death.
And he had his own private plane in Portugal, full with Soviet military equipment.
It was for Christian guerrilla, but they were Soviet material that he bought in Poland.
He just bought the plane from American Airlines.
From Pan American Airlines.
He's like Victor Boot.
So here we are.
You know, we had dinner with him, with his mother and brothers in New York.
And the following day, we flew on TWA first class to Lisbon.
Lisbon at that time was communist, Portugal was communist at the time.
So when we landed there, he didn't even have a visa or anything like that in his passport.
But he had a roll of $100 bill, a huge one.
He started giving tips to the people at the airport.
About 10 minutes later, we had the head of the airport with us.
You know, I don't know how much money he gave the guy.
The guy drove us in his jeep all the way to his plane.
Now, his plane was painted Pan American, but it didn't have the name Pan American.
But details yet.
The tail was November 7 11, Papa Alpha.
PA would mean Pan American.
That was the tail of the plane.
He had an American captain.
He had a Cuban navigator called Garavito.
Last name was Garavito.
And when we took off, and the plane was loaded with AK 47, RPGs, ammunition.
Oh, God.
But it was for the Christian guerrilla.
It was for the right people in Lebanon.
It was for the right people.
So we were supposed to arrive there about 8 o'clock at night, and the army was supposed to be waiting for us.
These pilots grew up with the GMT time, and we arrived an hour earlier.
I remember landing in Beirut, a beautiful view of Beirut at night.
You know, I landed from the cockpit.
I remember he calling the tower and saying this was a Mehmed, that is airline contracted plane by the military to go to the military ramp.
So they took us to the military ramp.
Now, when we arrived there, The authority, which are Muslim at the airport, they didn't see a Middle East airline playing.
They saw it's American, Pan American airline in there.
So that's where I learned that the word Sharamuta means SOB in Arabic.
Because a sarki was hanging at the door inside the plane.
The authority on the other side was trying to open the door and they were calling Sharamuta back and forth.
Organizing in Beirut00:02:49
One hour.
I was sitting there, I looked at the bag and see all of that weapon and said, Shit, I didn't tell my boss in Miami.
I was thinking what was going to happen.
Now we waited for one hour.
The army arrived.
They threw all the Muslims out of the area.
We didn't even go through custom.
They unloaded the plane with military trucks and then we went to the city.
No, I had a meeting with the head of intelligence.
We started trying to organize that, but then I spent about a month in Lebanon.
The day that the war broke completely, they closed the airport.
I left on the last plane, it was a golf air plane from Lebanon to London.
Wow.
The last day in there.
I never got to go back and follow up on that training because the war already broke to a point that there was no impossible to do that.
So I came back and went back to Miami.
Then in 1970, in 1983, I tried to go to El Salvador because I knew that my helicopter concept would be helpful in El Salvador, knowing the guerrilla in El Salvador.
I even went to El Salvador at that time, met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fidel Chavez Mena, through a close friend of his who was a millionaire.
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Then at the end of 1964, I always try again to go to El Salvador.
Returning to El Salvador00:13:19
I had the luck that my boss from Vietnam, Don Greg, was then the national security advisor to Vice President Bush.
Right.
And he knew darn well how effective.
Was my operation in Vietnam.
And he explained to me what Don tried to do the same thing in El Salvador.
So he helped me from the vice president's office.
He got me an appointment with Thomas Mudley, Secretary of State for Latin America.
Let me tell you, I didn't realize it was so difficult when you volunteered, not charging a single penny to go to the place for yourself.
It's almost impossible unless you have something like this behind you.
It would not happen.
Right.
Why?
Because the military commander was General Gorman, Paul Gorman.
He is the one responsible for the advice all over South America.
He's got no interest in one guy from Cuban origin, from the CIA, retired, to come to implement a concept that he has no idea if it works or not.
And he is the military commander and he has no control over me.
So he will oppose that, definitely.
Now, what we did is Don Greg got me in touch with Thomas Morley, Undersecretary of State, to explain him my concept.
I also brought the picture with Shed that helped, you know, the operation where I captured Shed.
So I briefed this guy.
Then they got me a meeting with Nestor Sanji, who was Undersecretary of Defense for Latin America.
We did the same thing with him.
And at that point in time, then General Gorman asked the White House, the military assistant to the president, it was Admiral Murphy, to ask him that he wanted to talk to me before I went to El Salvador.
So I got a call from the White House and told me, you know, call this guy, Captain Elder, who is the special assistant to General Gorman.
The general wants to talk to you before you go to El Salvador.
So I called this guy.
We later became friends.
He later became a colonel.
He was a captain then, a major, a major elder.
So I called him and said, look, He said, It's the general's directive you come to Panama to see as soon as possible.
I said, All right, 9 o'clock in the morning, can you pick me up at the airport at 7 o'clock?
He said, You mean today?
I said, Hey, you say as soon as possible.
Oh, let me check.
He checked with the general and said, Well, can you come tomorrow?
Because the general is busy to me.
He said, No problem.
I'd like somebody to pick me up at the airport because I bring in some things I don't want the Panamanian to see.
He said, No problem.
Captain Santiago will be waiting for you at the airport.
So I brought up my album with things that I did in Vietnam, you know, that.
Showed them exactly the capability that I had implementing counterinsurgency operations.
So we landed, they picked me up, they put me to a VIP, a general's room.
And on the following day, I went to Quarry High to the quarter of General Gorman.
And I spent like five hours briefing him personally.
We were interrupted once because there was a two star Peruvian general who arrived, and he went to say hello, and then he came back again.
And then after I finished briefing exactly what my, and he liked the concept that I was going to bring, he said, look, I told him, I said, Look, I think now that I am here, if you can get me a meeting with Ambassador Pickering, the U.S. ambassador in El Salvador, so I can brief him with that.
He said, Fine, but I want you to brief my Milgroup commander, Colonel Jim Steele, too.
So I will send you on my private plane.
So he had a huge plane to travel to the United States.
He had a Spotter 2 engine plane, Colonel C 12 plane.
And he got his plane to fly me from there to El Salvador.
So for people that are listening that may not know, can you give the context?
What was the U.S. doing in El Salvador?
Oh, they had military assistants in El Salvador.
They had a full colonel called James Steele.
They had a Lieutenant Colonel who was a friend of mine from the Bay of Fig, Lieutenant Lou Rodriguez in there.
They have a full crew, and they were the ones who support with military equipment and training.
They have a bunch of command sergeant majors advising the military unit.
They had an advisor of the CIA, for example, La Pral, who was like a special forces of the Air Force, a special unit.
Who were we training and what were we training them for?
No, they were trained for a special operation.
LaPrade would go in clandestinely to run into base camp.
They did the same thing our special forces did.
Right, okay.
It was a special unit of the Air Force.
And the Milgroup supported them with weapons, ammunition, fuel, everything for the operation itself.
But my concept was different.
They weren't implementing my concept.
They had no idea what my concept worked like.
Right.
Now, they were used to flying, for example, a helicopter at over 2,000 feet.
They never go loud because they were afraid.
Sometimes they were like, if you fly much lower than 2,000 feet, then you're really expired.
That's exposed.
Either you fly three top levels or you go high.
You don't fly in between.
No in between because you're exposed to.
But they don't know that.
They didn't ever experience that before.
So I got then the meeting with General Bustillo, the head of the Air Force.
Finally, he's the one who will give us the final decision.
And I explained to him the conseil, he said, I mean, what he told me is, Fine, I have no problem in you doing that, but we have a problem.
He said, What's the problem?
He said, Well, I cannot pay you.
I said, Who is asking you for pay?
I have my retirement from the CIA.
The only thing that I need is a place to stay, give me some food, and that's it.
You don't need to pay me a cent.
He said, Okay, fine.
Then we'll accept you.
Now, when I finally got there, he had me like a 10 foot pole.
I don't know why.
He rejected me.
If I came this way, he went the other way.
He would not even talk to me.
I couldn't understand that.
I said, Look, you know, I'm here and come myself.
I'm risking my life for these people because I believe that I can help them.
And this guy won't even talk to me.
But let's go along.
So I finally started trying to teach them how to fly the concept.
It was hard because when I got in the helicopter with one of the other pilots and I put a tree top level, he started to go up and up little by little.
And that's dangerous.
When you are at 500 feet, they can shoot you down very easily.
When you are in trouble of the tree, real touching the tree almost, when they hear the helicopter, they don't know from when you are coming because the sound of the helicopter is diffused.
They don't know you're coming this way or that way when you're really close.
By the time they see you, you are gone.
Because you're going over 50 miles an hour, you're gone.
But they didn't understand that.
So we programmed the first operation.
A friend of mine, Luke, was an owner of a property near the Lempa River, whose mechanic, from both mechanics, was kidnapped by the gorilla.
To their base camp to fix some sampan, some engine of the boat in there.
So I got the guy, he told me exactly what the camp, I flew him on the helicopter like he did in Vietnam.
We took the picture of the area, he told me exactly what the camps were.
I had a full intelligence package.
And I tried to do it commemorating the Bay of Pigs, April 17, 1985.
I hit for that day.
So I took all my intelligence package, went to the Estado Mayor.
I presented the package, they looked at it, they knew it was good intelligence, they liked it.
They told me, no, you cannot do it on the 17th.
You have to do it on the 18th.
They had an army battalion not far from that area.
They didn't tell us anything.
They told the battalion to come in to the base camp.
Okay?
They didn't tell him that they were going in that day.
What happened?
These people had posts all around the perimeter.
They saw the army coming.
So when they arrived into the camp, it was an empty camp, brand new empty camp.
They had just left the camp.
Okay?
So when we go in the next day, there was nobody there.
So the people started laughing at me that my intelligence was false.
We didn't know that the Army had gone there the day before.
So it got to a point that, you know, they were making fun of me that I carried these little granaditas, the womb, and they fired with a heavy weapon.
Because they were not used to use a smoke grenade, the color of a smoke grenade, to mark targets in the ground.
They never did that at tree top level.
So I had to borrow, the Air Force didn't have any.
We had to go to the paratrooper unit to borrow this smoke grenade from them to be able to use it in the operation.
So, when we came back, we didn't find anything.
We found a camp, empty camp.
I came back, you know, they were making fun of me.
I told Colonel Steele, I said, Look, I am leaving.
These people don't want any help.
No, no, no, no.
He told me, Look, I have faith in your operation.
Let me talk to the commander of the helicopter units, Captain Trigueros.
So, he went to see Trigueros and said, Look, you know, you didn't do it, because we didn't do it well either.
I was supposed to fly in first, three top level.
My machine gun didn't work.
And on the river, they came back to fix the machine, and the helicopter arrived before I did.
It was all wrong, even though they were not already there.
But if he had been there, they would have probably been gone.
So they told them, Look, you have to do it the way Max, my name was Max Gomez.
Max tells you how to do it.
So at that point in time, they arrive with intelligence from somewhere saying, hey, there are guerrilla movements in Cerro de San Pedro.
So Trigueros tells the colonel, oh, we just received some information, some guerrilla in this area.
We are going to try Max's concept.
And then you can raid us to see how good we did.
You know, they're making fun of us.
Okay?
Making fun of us.
Right.
I DM'd one of us and said, look, look, try it.
So, you know, I got my grenade.
I got into the goddamn helicopter, ready to go to Cerro de San Pedro.
Well, It was a gold mine.
They were all there.
First of all, they are not used to helicopter flying at the top level.
Normally, what they tell the guerrilla is when you hear a helicopter, even if you are in the open, you hit the ground and don't move.
And it's true.
You are flying at 2,000 feet, for example, and you're looking at the ground, any small movement is attracted to your eyes.
Right.
Immediately, even whatever it is, you get attracted to that little movement.
If the guy is static, if he's not moving, even if it is in the open field, you cannot spot him.
Impossible.
You are looking at Thousands of square miles in there.
You cannot spot them.
So, what happened?
I am flying on top of the trees.
This guy here, the helicopter, goes down, they don't move.
I slow down, I can shoot them, they are not shooting back.
It's ridiculous.
Because they were told to hit the ground and don't move.
But they didn't tell him not with the helicopters on top of you.
And I was on top of them.
So, I eliminated, I don't know, maybe 15 or 20 of them that way.
Wow.
Then continue to go.
Then they called me and said, hey, they're There are a bunch of people going on the top of a ravine, going into a wooded area.
Not much, on top of two mountains, you know, empty, no.
So I went out with the helicopter, my other pilot, he emptied the minigun completely on them.
There were about eight of them.
They killed like seven of them.
And there was one that survived, and another little kid that ran into the woods in there, okay?
And here are some huge backpacks.
Especially there was a female gorilla, Achimutu.
I got close to her.
It wasn't even more than 15, 16 years old.
Wow.
And she had a blue, huge backpack in the back of her.
We know what it was.
It was the commander, Nidia Diaz, moving from one base camp to the other.
So they have all the documentation from the PRTC, Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores Centroamericanos.
It's the Workers' Party, Communist Party from El Salvador, Central America.
They were moving on.
So I told my pilots, I said, look, ask Trigueros, Captain Trigueros, Sandor Trigueros, to bring some troops.
He called back, it was a Sunday.
They didn't talk about going to have anything.
There was no troop in a standby to go to react to the operation.
The guy said, No, no, the captain said that no, they don't have any troops to come.
I said, Okay, put me down.
I am going to pick up those backpacks and I will bring them to a helicopter.
I'll pick it up.
He said, All right.
He started putting me down and then right next to this guy, this guy was, I don't know, maybe like a Cuban.
He was bigger than the Salvadorian, dark hair, and he had a foul.
And he started moving the foul toward me.
So, I already had on a strap from the helicopter, I opened fire with the M16 and killed him.
The helicopter on top, listen, machine gun fire, and they tell my pilot, I wasn't even connected to communication.
They tell him, You are taking fire, leave.
I almost, you know, had to have myself in the helicopter because he just took off.
And I said, Look, we were not taking fire, I am firing at the guy.
But the pilot didn't want to come down again.
So, he convinced Trigueros to bring some troops finally.
And then we see this guerrilla.
Moving behind drip.
Okay.
We run out of ammunition with that.
So I always carry my M16 with about 18, 30 round magazines, 30 bullets each.
And I learned, which I tell them because they didn't know that a lot of times, if you try to fire all 30 rounds one time, it will get a jam, normally.
What will happen?
You pull the trigger with 30 rounds.
The jam.
To let it go at one time, normally they get jammed.
Right.
And the only reason I learned in Vietnam they don't get jammed, you put the bullet out, you get WD-40 oil, and you spray a little bit like this, then you go all the way and put it one by one.
You don't have a misfire.
All 30 will go straight.
Wow.
And when you fire a guerrilla, you're flying, you don't fly all 30 rounds.
And you try to spread toward where the target is because it's impossible to hit somebody when you're flying at a certain speed.
So I started doing that with her.
Finally, I hit her.
Private Citizen Intervention00:15:13
I didn't know it was her, I thought it was a he, because she had his hair on the side of a little hat, camouflage hat.
You hit her?
Yeah.
And she saved six times.
It was a very unimportant place because she survived.
And then they come to the helicopter and they pick her up, they pick a little kid.
They carried, and one were allowed to go.
We didn't shoot at him.
There were two kids about six, seven years old.
They kidnapped those kids to be able to send documents to the cities and pick up documents from the city because the kids, nobody bothered with them.
So they bring them to the city, go to this location, and become a happy, you know, the point of contact with the city.
So we captured her and a little kid that was kidnapped in another place.
So when I came back to the clinic where she was being treated, I went to get a souvenir, and everybody has taken everything as a souvenir.
Their uniform, everything.
The only thing that was left was her panties and her brassiere.
That's all left.
Wow.
The panties didn't smell good, so I took the brassiere with me as a souvenir, okay?
Which created a problem you would not believe.
You know, when I was coming home at that time, I always came home with an Air Force plane that came once a month to pick up PX things for the PX.
Okay, because I didn't have money to fly back and forth.
So every single month, the plane would come for three days to pick up things for the PX in Armed Forces PX in El Salvador.
So I used to come in the plane and spend three days with my family and then fly back on the plane.
So I flagged the plane here.
I had the goddamn brassiere inside my suitcase.
I forgot to mention to my wife.
So when she unpacked, she saw the brassiere and she could not believe it was a war trophy.
She was convinced I was doing hunky-punky in El Salvador.
I tried to tell her.
Well, I was in the doghouse.
That's a hard sell.
I was in the doghouse close to two years.
In two years, Nidia Nia wrote a book after she was released because eventually she was released.
She went to Cuba.
Then she came back and became a congresswoman in the part of San Salvador.
And she wrote in her memoirs that she wrote a book called Nunca Estuve Sola I Was Never Alone.
And she mentioned at the end in there that I was the one who had disrespectful because I took a personal thing of her as a souvenir.
So I showed it to my wife.
Then she apologized to me for the first time.
She believed me after that.
Before that, she didn't believe me.
What a start.
While I was flying with El Salvador in 1985, that's when I got involved.
I went there to fly my helicopter concept.
But in September of 1985, that's when Jorge Mascanoso asked me first of all, he asked me to pick up Posada Carriles.
Remember the guy, Luis Posada Carriles, who had escaped from a Venezuelan prison?
He had him in Aruba.
So he asked me if I would go to Aruba and protect him in El Salvador.
I said, Lou, I cannot fly to Aruba because I have a lot of operations.
But if you fly him to El Salvador, I will give him protection.
That's what we did, you know.
So he started operating with another name, helping me in El Salvador during that time.
Then, at one point in time, in 1986, I got a call from a communication letter from Oliver Norris.
What happened to him was there was a plane from Caleros, one of the head of the resistance brother, who was bringing things, property contracts from the United States.
Now, the only thing at the time, because of the Bolan Amendment, that you could bring from the United States legally was uniform, booth, sacks, backpack.
Communication equipment, that's it.
You're going to bring a single bullet or a knife or anything from there.
So they had this C 54 plane full with all of these things, civilian clothes.
And then what they did, Mario, who was the brother of the other Calero, he brought a television crew, I don't know if it was CBS or NBC, one of those crew.
The plane landed in the Palmadora military base, which is American and Honduran.
When the Hondurans saw a crew of television, now everybody knew they were helping, but not to the point.
Put it like so black and white on television.
So when they saw that crew coming out of the plane, they said, Ah, go back.
You're not authorized to land here.
So they sent the plane back with everything that was on board.
Okay?
They couldn't do anything.
By that time, Oliver North had a C 130 from Southern Air Transport in Portugal.
They had bought a lot of weapons in there.
They bought the K 47, they bought some hand grenades that were all, by the way, all kinds of things.
They bought them from where?
I'm from Portugal.
The government of Portugal.
The plane was already there loading it up.
The Honduran, because of what happened, said, You are no longer allowed to bring any plane here until we solve this problem with your buses.
So he couldn't fly the plane there.
The plane was costing him every day, standing there doing nothing.
So then he came to me.
He said, Look, Felix, you are very well connected with the Salvadorans.
I respect you.
See if you can get authority from their Minister of Defense for us to bring this plane down.
And we can unload all of this, about 100,000 pounds of military equipment, put it temporarily in a Salvadorian warehouse until we can solve the problem in Honduras, we can bring it back to Honduras.
Right.
Okay.
So I went to see the head of the Air Force, General Bustillo.
I explained to him what it was.
Of course, they wanted to help the Nicaraguan resistance because they knew most of the weapons, all the weapons coming into El Salvador either came directly from Piova by boat or through the Sandinistas from Nicaragua.
So they are very ready to help the Nicaraguan resistance.
So, he told me to go and talk to Vides Casadon, the Minister of Defense, and tell him that I support 100%.
So, they agreed.
So, the following day, I was waiting in there.
Here comes the C 130 from Southern Air.
They unloaded the whole thing.
We put it in a warehouse in El Salvador.
And from there, they asked me ask the Salvadorans if we could do maintenance of the aircraft in El Salvador.
We will pay for the fuel, we will pay for the mechanics, we will have our own mechanic, we will pay for every spare part.
Oh, they agreed.
That's how we got involved with the Nicaraguan resistance.
That's how when shit hit the fence that the plane of Hassenfoss went down in Nicaragua.
He named you, right?
He named me.
Well, he didn't know my name.
Oh, I thought he actually gave your name up.
He named Max Gomez.
Max Gomez, okay.
Now, Mike Wallace went to do a 60 minute with him, with Hassenfoss.
He did later on in 89.
Mike Wallace did a 60 minute on my life.
Did anybody know that you were Max Gomez?
Who knew you were Max Gomez?
I'm Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban government.
So, the Cuban government is the one who gave the intelligence to the Sandinistas that I was Felix Rodriguez.
So, they gave the information to Mike Wallace.
Hasenfoss didn't say Felix Rodriguez because he didn't know my name.
He only called Max Roman.
Got it.
And then my wallet, when they say, well, Mark Gomez is Felix Rodriguez, what the Cuban told him.
Got it.
I see.
I see.
And that's how my name came involved in the Iran control thing.
That's why then they asked me to testify in Congress as a witness in May of 1987.
What was that like going through that whole thing?
Let me tell you, it was, how can I put it?
It was, it was not, I would say it was bothersome.
I feel bad from a point of view that it's disturbing.
They have to be involved in something that has nothing to do really with that thing and see the political angle that they were going to bring.
They all wanted to bring George Bush into that operation.
Because of my friendship with Don Gray, they wanted to be able to say that George Bush, that's what they did say actually, that Felix Rodriguez went down there, sent by the vice president to violate the Boland Amendment.
And the helicopter flying was a cover up operation for his real operation, who was to be able to violate the Bolan Amendment and help break around resistance, which was not the case.
It was the other way around.
It was by coincidence I got involved in that thing.
So they asked me to testify on the 27th, 28th of May of 1987.
And then, of course, when the plane went down, I had to leave El Salvador, went to Miami.
I had to hide in that the plane was, I had people in front of my house.
It was a pain.
They asked to move from there.
I couldn't go anywhere.
All the paper was trying to ask you questions.
It was a mess.
Then I received a subpoena to testify in front of the Iran Contract Committee.
I had to go several times.
And the problem is that everybody wanted me to bring a lawyer.
I didn't want to.
First of all, I couldn't afford one.
But Jorge Mascanoza, the leader of the Cuban American Foundation, offered to pay a lawyer for me.
And the White House offered to pay a lawyer for me.
Mascarnosa, because he didn't want to come out that he was the one who asked me to hide in their Posada Carriles.
Even though I told him I would never mention that.
But he wanted to make sure that I didn't talk about that because he was the one who asked me to bring Posada Carriles into El Salvador.
And then the White House was concerned about the vice president.
And I told them, look, I told them at one point I was as a witness of the Senate.
One time, there is, I don't know, five, six, seven depositions at different times with different people.
One of them was at the top floor of the Senate.
And they were mostly Democrats and maybe three or four Republicans.
Who was deposing you?
The Iran Contract Committee on the Senate side.
Was that Danny Sheehan?
No, That had nothing to do with the Iran Contract Committee.
Oh, I thought that was funny.
Danny Sheehan was a liar from the Christian Institute.
Oh, okay.
No, he had nothing to do with this.
Oh, okay.
No, no.
He even had to pay.
Everything he was saying was BS.
Nothing was true.
Right, right.
No, Sheehan had nothing to do with this.
It was really the U.S. government.
So as I am waiting, the guy who came out before me was McFarland.
They were deposing McFarland.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, McFarland, yeah.
Yeah, I was next to McFarland.
And I told them, I said, look, because they asked me, I said, look, people want me to bring a lawyer.
But I tell you what, if I have to bring a lawyer for what I have done, I am in the wrong country.
And I don't believe I am in the wrong country.
I don't need a lawyer.
So everybody looked at them like it was nuts, all right?
So time goes by, the White House insisted again that they wanted me to bring a lawyer.
They asked me to go to Washington and talk to Boyd Don Gray, who was the lawyer to the vice president.
And later became a lawyer to the president.
And he told me, I said, Look, Felix, we know the vice president didn't do anything wrong, but you don't know this congressman.
They might trick you into saying a thing that might hurt the vice president.
We'll allow you to bring a lawyer.
I said, I won't.
I will not bring a lawyer.
Well, at least talk to one.
I said, OK, but I didn't talk to anybody.
So I came back to Miami again.
Now, my son and my daughter heard the story that if I didn't bring a lawyer, I was going to go to prison.
That's what people say, told them.
Yeah, when they were kids.
I didn't know that until maybe six months ago that I always kept in contact with the FBI because the situation with Che Guevara, the advisor, I was his advisor, Centeno and I, was assassinated in Paris.
By the so called Commando Che Guevara.
Mayor Quintanilla, who was a colonel, was assassinated in Hamburg, Germany with the Commando Che Guevara.
And at that time, we're talking the 70s, I got a call in my house saying, Felix Ramos, the name that I use in Bolivia, you're going to be next.
But I told the agency.
So the agency at the time wanted me to change the name, go on to another state, which I refused because it's hard.
It was traumatic for my son and my daughter to change their name and lose all their friends and then see our immediate family every six months in another state.
It was a mess.
It wasn't worth it.
It was worse than being killed.
So I refused that.
So, what they did, they came to my home, they put iron fences in my house, they built a garage so that my car will sleep inside the garage.
They gave me a license to carry concealed weapons.
It was very difficult to get one.
And now everybody can get one, not at that time.
And they gave me a telephone in my car.
Now, the telephone are waiting listed, they're not sell.
They're the old one in the car that was with sick line in the back, and they think that it was 10 years waiting period for a darn phone.
Wow.
So when I applied, I recall the guy called me from the phone company and said, Mr. Rodriguez, if I am still here, call me in 10 years.
I called the agency and said, Look, this is what I've been told.
So they called me back and said, Call the guy again.
I said, Look, he told me 10 years.
He called the guy again.
So I called Mr. So and so, I'm sorry.
I know you told me 10 years, but have you heard anything about my phone?
His answer was, Mr. Rodriguez, I don't know who the hell you are.
For your phone number, so and so will be connected day after tomorrow.
And then they took my car.
It was a 12 year old Cadillac Seville, they took it to Lanley and they bulletproofed my car.
And then I did sign a document for the CIA that if I got assassinated, connected to my service to the agency, my family could not reclaim anything from the agency because they offered me what they considered was going to be the real security of my life.
So I did sign the paper and, you know, I stayed in Miami the whole time, my same house all of this year.
And they provided security for your family?
No, I had contact with the FBI.
If I ever felt I had any problem, Because I am a federal agency, I could not call the local police.
I have to call the FBI.
So I always had a contact with the Bureau of Officers.
So when I was going to this scene through the Iran Contra scene, my contact was Carlos Duran from the Bureau, from the FBI.
Six months or eight months ago, my wife learned from his widow, because he died from cancer, that we didn't know that.
My son, my daughter went to see Carlos.
And they told Carlos, You are a very close friend of my dad.
Everybody tells us that if he doesn't bring a lawyer, he's going to go to prison.
And we know you are very close to him.
Please convince him to take some lawyer with him.
So I remember Carlos called me and said, Look, I'd like to talk to you.
He said, So, fine.
So we went to my friend, all the two of us along.
So what he told me, I said, Look, Felix, I want you to listen very carefully.
You are going to be testifying in front of Congress, and you're going to be under oath.
You cannot lie.
Believe me, I have experience.
If you lie, they are going to have 15 different depositions, and they're going to ask the same question 15 different times.
If you lie, it's going to come out.
And you are going to go to prison.
You cannot lie to them.
Now, if something you don't want to talk about for whatever reason, you don't remember.
They cannot do you anything if you don't remember.
Fifth Amendment.
Testifying Before Congress00:06:50
That was the best advice I ever got.
I never lied.
Right.
I didn't remember very few times.
Well, you were also there following orders.
Like you were, it's not like.
No, it was independent.
Remember, I was flying on my own.
Nobody was paying me.
I have orders for nobody.
Independent.
Okay.
Yeah.
I went as a private citizen to help them.
Okay, I understand.
No, no, nobody.
That's why you need to talk to me.
That's why Gorman was concerned.
Right.
That's why he wanted to talk to me.
Because here's a guy who went from like a military in my area, in the Air Force, where I do have an advisor.
And when I went there, Gorman asked me, I want you to talk to my MIL group commander also.
And I became very close to Jim Steele.
He helped me a lot.
I confided with him the operation.
He loved the operation I was doing.
At times, he would fly with me after I learned how to fly.
I am not a pilot.
I was not a pilot.
When I was in Vietnam, a pilot told me, I said, Look, at least you need how to fly this and land this thing.
But in fact, I got badly wounded flying at D3 level, we're both going to get killed.
So he taught me how to fly the helicopter.
And then in El Salvador, I perfected it.
I could take the helicopter by myself, start wrong, and I could take a Huey or a UH500 by myself and fly after, you know, I've got flown many, many, many times.
But I never went to school.
What did you think when you found out about this whole Iran Contra scandal blowing up and all these people making all this money?
With the weapons smuggler.
No, that's what I was concerned about.
Smuggling the drugs back.
Because I knew that C Corps was making a lot of money on this.
And that's why my relationship with North broke when I told him.
He didn't want to accept it.
C Corps was the one controlling the whole money.
Okay?
I have met C Corps before, one time.
At one time, I was asked, but I was retired, after retiring from the agency, to do an evaluation of the political advisor of Oman.
So, I spent living in Cairo more than six months with the political advisor of the Sultan of a man who was actually born in Libya.
And I met Mubarak.
I was in Hosni Mubarak's home when he was vice president, teaching him how to operate American 160 submachine guns that this Arab bought 10 of them, one for Mubarak, one for the president.
So he seeks for the intelligence service.
So, I had to teach them.
It was the first submachine with laser beam.
The laser was this big.
I mean, it's a huge thing.
I mean, with attachment under the machine.
And so, I went to Mubarak's home in Heliopolis with this Arab to teach him how to handle this so he can tell also the president how to operate this goddamn thing.
They have drums with 154 bullets each.
So, that's what I met Mubarak.
I became a close friend of Ahmed Kamil, the head of intelligence for Egypt.
I have some very good friends in there.
So I stayed there for a while and all of that.
So I met a lot of people in different places there.
So going back to this, I have to testify, like I said, in Congress, and I went by myself finally with no lawyers.
It was, at the end, I was tired.
I could tell I was really, really tired on the second day.
Now, the first day, when you go in there, No, I am the only one who goes without immunity, without a lawyer.
And I made a point of not taking one drop of water.
Because when everybody was drinking water, the camera would be facing you.
So I said, I'm not going to touch the water during the whole time, purposely.
Which I didn't.
You can see my testimony in CSPAN.
You should do that today.
You go to CSPAN, and my whole testimony is there, 27 May, 28th of May, 1987.
So the first day is the easiest day, really.
The first day is the lawyer that was assigned to me was Paul Barbadoro.
Kecker was assigned to, John Kecker was assigned to Norse.
He was the prosecutor for Norse.
Right.
This guy, Paul Barbadora, was assigned to me.
I am as a witness, not prosecuted by him, as a witness.
So we had a good relationship with him.
At one point in time, I was bringing a lot of things to his deposition.
And he told me, I said, Felix, if you don't want us to see what you have in the drum ring, but we have the power to subpoena anything that you bring in there.
I said, Look, I have nothing to worry.
You can see everything I bring here.
I don't have to worry about that.
So the first day of the testimony was 27th of May.
I was the second witness that day.
They go all the way from the day that you were born.
From the day you were born, they go all the way, all together, until the Iran Contra thing.
Wow.
They go minute by minute, hour by hour, they go in there.
And in details, when you go to the Iran Contra thing, then it goes into definitely details.
Before that, it's a general thing where you were born, when I went to school, perky, everything high school, everything that you did in your life, regular life.
Now, when they hit the point that you started, not only the Bay of Pigs, when they started the Iran Contra, then they really go into details.
You know, to expose the whole thing.
Right.
That was the first day, only for that.
The second day, they have the first hour dedicated to what they call the heaters, Bayball's heaters.
The heaters were four people two senators and two congressmen, one Republican, one Democrat.
One Republican, one Democrat.
Those people were supposed to be the ones who were assigned to read everything about me, all my depositions.
So those four people would know more about me than anybody else.
The rest of the committee, Can read whatever they want.
But these people are obliged to read everything.
In these four cases that were my hitter, they have to read everything about my life, what I did, and everything.
So they know more about me than myself, supposedly.
Then they start for 15 minutes asking questions.
I have to answer questions.
One of them was Mitch.
He was actually the chairman of the Senate, the head of the Senate on the Democratic side.
So you have to go through 15 minute questions from both of them.
That's one hour.
Then they open up the whole scene for the whole people to ask questions.
Then anybody in the committee can ask questions.
I got a question for Peter Rodin.
I got a question from the vice president of Bush.
What is his name?
His daughter is the one who became very critical of Trump.
Senate Committee Questions00:14:43
Remember, this hungry woman.
Cheney.
Dick Cheney.
Dick Cheney was the last one who asked a question of me.
Liz Cheney?
Yeah.
So they go through the whole thing two days.
So, when I finished my testimony, if you are able to look at what CNN said, the lady from CNN came and said, After Mr. Rodriguez's testimony, nobody can touch the vice president with a silk globe.
That was her comment at the end of my testimony.
And then I went back to El Salvador.
I continued to fly with the Salvadorian Air Force, because that's what I did.
So, I finished in 1987.
I continued to fly with the Salvadorian Air Force until December of 1988.
I testified in May of 87.
Wow.
Now, when I am in El Salvador, my wife called me and she was very, very upset because there was my picture when I was in the Army as a second lieutenant, it appeared in the front page of the Miami Herald.
It was put out to the press by John Kerry that I had received $10 million from the Medellin cartel for the Contras.
$10 million from the Medellin cartel?
The accusation of Cuba being involved with the CIA in drugs came from Cuban intelligence.
Really?
Oh, yes.
It's amazing.
And John Kerry found out that I had contact with one guy who was the head of the Medellin cartel finances, Cuban, Ramon Millan Rodriguez.
In 1985, Raul Diaz, who is well known in the police community, he was the head of the CENTAC, a special unit against narcotics, who persecuted this lady, Grisela.
They have a movie about her.
Grisela Blanco?
Grisela Blanco.
He was the head of the task force who factionally got her.
Raul Diaz, a good friend of mine, he called me and said, Look, I have a guy from the Medellin cartel who is the accountant for that cartel who told me that he can compromise the Nicaraguan resistance in narco trafficking.
He doesn't want to deal with the FBI or the DEA because he said they are penetrated.
He wants to deal with the CIA on somebody who has a connection to the vice president's office because at that time George Bush was the czar and anti drug czar of the administration.
So he told, I'll bring you to your home.
He said, No, you don't bring the SOB to my house.
I go to your office.
I went to Raul Diaz's office and here's this guy, tall guy, thin guy.
I didn't like him because he was kind of arrogant.
You know, and very, excuse me.
Okay.
You can take it if you need to.
Very arrogant.
And then, yeah, I thought I put this thing in.
Yeah, I have put it in the ring because the alarm doesn't go by the ring.
So this guy started telling me that he had a record.
Recording for an assistant of Daniel Ortega, who was then president of Nicaragua, who asked him to jump bail.
He actually said he went from Nicaragua to Guatemala to call him in Miami.
And this assistant, Daniel Ortega, told Milián Rodríguez, Look, we'd like you to run bail to be able to set up a money laundering operation for the Nicaraguan government in Panama.
And we will pay whatever you lose in your bail.
But he said he didn't want to go to prison because what he did, he told me, he would probably have to go to prison for five years.
He didn't want his son to see his father going to prison.
I didn't know whether he had a son or not, but that way he told me to go to prison.
So I listened to his story.
When I left, I mentioned the whole thing to Carlos Duran from the FBI.
He didn't give it down.
He said he didn't trust the FBI.
He did trust them.
So I passed the whole information to Carlos Duran.
Then when I went to Washington, I went to the CIA.
I asked for the guy who had to do narcotics for the agency.
And they brought me a small guy, bald, heavy.
And I passed him the whole information this guy told me.
And he seems to be interested in what the guy had to say.
Time went by, they never called him.
Raul Diaz called me and said, Hey, what happened?
I said, Look, Raul, if they didn't call you, it's because they're not interested.
Later on, I found out that this guy from the agency who was interested, before he did anything, he called Leon Kellner.
Leon Kellner was the prosecutor for Ramon Millan Rodriguez case here in Miami.
And Leon Kellner told him, Don't bother to talk to this guy.
This guy's a liar.
That's bullshit.
He never had anything to do with the Sandinista.
He will do anything to get a lower sentence.
That's why they never called him.
Okay.
Now, Kerry, while I was testifying in Congress, one Republican senator asked me if I had any knowledge of Sandinista being involved in narco trafficking.
So I remember this case.
So I mentioned this case of Ramon Milan Rodriguez, who wanted to throw money laundering operations for the Sandinista.
Kerry listened to that and he sent his assistant, Jack Blum, to find out where the hell this guy is, Ramon Milan Rodriguez.
Ramon Milan Rodriguez was at the time in a federal prison with 45 years.
Not five, like he told me, with 45 years to do in jail.
And Jack Blum told him, If you can compromise the vice president through Phyllis, now you cannot lie to us, it has to be true, but if you can compromise the vice president through Phyllis, we are going to lower your sentence.
What did the guy say?
Now, it has to be true.
Okay, what did the guy say?
Oh, yeah, Phyllis is a patriot, he never touched a penny.
He saw his poor troops in the field that didn't have any weapons, so he came to us and we gave him $10 million from the Medellin cartel.
To help the Contras, and in turn, he was going to have the vice president to be lenient with us, which is ridiculous.
So, Kerry put a subpoena on me because of that, accusing me of receiving $10 million from the Megan Cartel.
Now, my wife is working at that time at Barry University, right next to our home.
Imagine, front page of the Miami Herald, that your husband had received $10 million from the Megan Cartel.
Of course, she's upset.
So, she called me and I said, Look, Ross, you know that's not true.
She said, I know that.
I work at the university.
You have to clear this.
And these people are looking at me like my husband is involved with $10 million of the Medellin cartel.
So, by the way, you have a subpoena from Senator Kerry's committee here.
It's like, give me the number.
So I called his office.
I talked to Jack Blump.
I said, look, you don't need a subpoena with me, but send me the ticket in Easter because I am doing mileage.
Send me the ticket in Easter and I'll go.
So they sent me the ticket in Easter.
I flew to Washington.
They deposed me for five hours at Kerry's office.
No, Kerry wasn't there.
It was Jack Blump.
And the other one was Robinette, who was the assistant of Mitch McConnell.
Mitch McConnell was the minority at the time in Kerry's committee because they controlled the Senate at the time.
So Kerry was the chairman and Mitch McConnell was the.
At the end of my five hour deposition, Robinette and myself from Mitch McConnell's office, I said, we wanted an open hearing.
Oh, Jack Blum wanted a closed hearing.
I said, what is classified here?
Look, I retired from the CIA for security consideration in 1976.
This thing happened in 1985.
We're just classified about it.
No, no, no, it had to be a close.
He didn't want the truth to come out.
He didn't want the truth that people believed that we were involved in narco trade.
He knew it wasn't true.
He didn't want that to happen.
No, no, no, it had to be a close hearing.
No choice.
That's why I was so unhappy when I got in.
The first thing that I told them, they were all the senators Mitch McConnell and Kerry in the middle, and all the other senators from both sides of the aisle.
And they asked me if I wanted to say something.
I said, yes.
I looked at Kerry and said, Senator.
This will be the hardest testimony of my life.
Now, believe me, this is happening after my testimony in Congress, which is May 27th, way after that.
And I say, What do you say, Mr. Rodriguez?
I say, Senator, it's very difficult to have to answer a question from somebody that you do not respect.
And I don't respect you, what you're doing here.
Mr. Rodriguez, because we disagree with you, we are no less patriotic than you are.
Because, Senator, you didn't even have the guts to throw your own medal when you were protesting the Vietnam War.
Mr. Rodriguez, don't believe everything that you read.
I say, Senator, I know that the hell of a lot better than you do.
You didn't have the courage to throw your own medal through the Vietnam War.
Say, that was a veteran who asked me to throw his medal.
It wasn't me.
I said, bullshit.
It was everybody's perception.
It was your medal you were throwing over the Vietnam, over the White House wall.
Well, it wasn't very unpleasant, the exchange.
So we went through the whole testimony.
Of course, he knew it wasn't true what he was doing, all right?
Then we asked for an open hearing.
My uncle, who is a lawyer graduated from Tulane, wrote a letter to his committee during eight months asking for an open hearing.
It never happened.
Ten months later, I got a call from Robinette.
Senator Mitch McConnell said, if you're willing to come to Washington to request an open hearing with him at the press conference at the Senate.
I said, of course.
So I prepared with my uncle a statement of three pages long, enumerating in details my relationship with Ramon Villarreal, what happened, how we came to talk to him, the whole thing in detail.
And at the end, I wrote, and I'm sure that this would serve, I hope that this serves for a true situation and not for Chancellor Kerry's political agenda.
That came out in there, okay?
Next month, he gave me an open hearing.
Hmm.
Friday.
Friday is the only day which is stipulated in the Senate that there is no cameras in the room.
There are cameras in the room from Monday to Thursday, but not on Friday.
It was the only date of the week that they don't have cameras in the room.
Yeah.
Monday to Thursday, there is camera.
But they always reserve Friday for some reason they don't want to be camera.
He selected that day for me.
There was no camera.
And it was the last question to be.
Put on, which meant that a lot of people already gone home by that time.
There was very few press to cover that.
In there, he told me that he apologized that he believed me.
But I said, at the same time, he asked me if I would take a light detector today.
I said, yes, but I want you to take one because you're doing this politically.
Well, I will not take one.
I said, fine.
You don't take one?
I will not take one.
You do it?
I'll take it.
So, on those terms, he told me, you are not excused.
I said, okay, fine.
So, we finished the testimony.
He did a good thing.
He called the best.
Polygraph operator in the nation, and the name was a doctor by the name of Dr. Rufkin from the University of Utah, brought him to Washington and he gave a light detector test to Ramon Millian Rodriguez.
First question Did Mr. Rodriguez solicit for you $10 million from the Medellin cartel?
Yes, deceptive, he was lying.
Second question Did Mr. Rodriguez give you carriers in Central America to channelize those $10 million from the Medellin cartel to the contra?
Yes, deceptive, he was lying.
Third question Did Mr. Rodriguez receive in any way or form any money from the Medellin cartel?
Ramon Leon Rodriguez refused to continue with the light detector test.
How did Kerry write that in the congressional record?
First, two, he had no choice.
First question, well, he was lying.
The second question, on the third question, whether Mr. Rodriguez received some money from the Medicante, the operator could not determine the veracity of the question.
Now, you read that, what do you think?
Maybe some truth to it.
Right.
But they don't tell you, they could not find out because the guy refused to continue with the light detector test.
Right.
No, I have been saying that all around because I saw a copy of the record at that time.
Since then, the son of a bitch changed that.
Really?
Yeah, now it's saying there that exactly what I said, okay?
At that time, he put that.
Now, the second time, he said the guy refused to continue with the light detector test.
But on the first version that he put out, they didn't say that.
But he knew I have been saying that everywhere.
Somehow, you know how hell he did that?
He went in and corrected that in the testimony.
That's why I hate the SOB so much.
Every time that I speak, Now, when there was the Vietnam Veteran for the Truth, no, you heard at the time.
They had a big rally on the west wing of the Capitol, over 100,000 veterans against Kerry when he ran for president.
You remember that?
Check.
There was a rally on the west wing of the Capitol.
There were eight speakers.
I was one of them.
I spoke to the people that were with Kerry in the boat.
We got it together.
I was one of the eight speakers, so we all got together in there.
He was never, ever wounded in Vietnam.
He got three Purple Hearts.
Really?
He doesn't have a single hole in his body from a bullet.
He would have scratched it somewhere and said that was from a hand grenade or was from a mortar fire, that he got a Skirla, metal Skirla.
The third time, the guy refused to give him the Purple Hearts because he didn't deserve it.
He had to wait for the officer to change to be able to get the third one.
And you know why he did that?
Because it was unwritten law that if you got wounded three times in one tour, you could request to be taken away from the operational area.
And that's what he did.
No, it wasn't automatic.
You request.
Immediately that he requested to leave there.
And he claimed that he got some Silver Star and convinced that he fabricated that with his friends in the Navy.
That is no, he's a complete fraud.
Wow.
He didn't spend one second, he didn't spend more than five minutes in a hospital when he claimed he was wounded.
He made a scratch, got a little blood coming out of there, and said that was from a hand grenade during combat.
If you get wounded by a hand grenade, or you get wounded from a skillet, from a mortar, you are a recipient of the, you don't have to be a bullet, you're a recipient of the Purple Heart.
Right.
But he didn't.
He got the three Purple Hearts that way, and immediately he left the service.
And then he went with Jane Fonda.
To call that people were assassinating people, kids, and all of that in Vietnam.
That's why I speak to the different military units that I go to.
I tell them how proud I feel today to see how the public treated the military coming from overseas.
Because I have been in the plane, they applaud them, they buy drinks for them, they offer their first seat for them.
At that time, they hated going in uniform because they were the way to spit on you.
Purple Hearts and Fonda00:15:03
Because you were supposed to be a war criminal, you were supposed to kill, and that was due to Carey's and Jane Fonda's perception of the war, the world war.
But that's why I don't like the guy at all.
Right.
Let's talk about Che Guevara.
Oh, yeah, I forgot.
I left that behind.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
After Bolivia, that's when I went to Che.
That's an important story, right there.
Thank you for this photograph that you signed.
I actually went to Bolivia after being in the.
I forgot about the more important one for you.
This is you right here?
Yeah.
When I went to Bolivia, I was 26 years old.
It was right after coming out of.
No, before I went to Ecuador and Peru.
How long did you hunt Che for?
Very short.
We arrived, I think we arrived in Bolivia in June.
Now, first of all, the way when there was an American, pretty high guy in the Western Hemisphere, CIA, by the name of Larry Sternfield.
Larry was the one who answered to Mr. Sterling, Jake Stager, and he was the number two guy responsible in great extent for the Bay of Pigs.
And Larry was working for him.
Larry was pretty high in the agency.
He came to Miami, interviewed 16 Cuba to select two to go to Bolivia.
They already had three Cubans in Bolivia at the level of La Paz.
They were advised to the Minister of Interior, Arguedas.
Mayor Roberto Quintanillo was the advisor to the Minister of Interior there.
But then they wanted two guys to be able to accompany the military units in Bolivia to what would supposedly be going against Shea.
The first combat in Bolivia was a complete total disaster because the Bolivians weren't trained properly.
Most of the crumbs creep, the soldiers were never used in military training.
Barriento used them in the Corps of Engineers to build roads for the people.
That's why they love Barriento so much.
And he had an agrarian reform before, a lot of farmers had a lot of land.
That's another mistake for him.
He went there telling them, I'm going to give you the land that Barriento steals from you, and Barriento gave them land.
So they look at them like, What is the guy telling me?
Maybe he has an empty message.
That's why during the whole time, which has never happened to any guerrilla in the world, there was a single guerrilla that never recruited one single farmer in close to a year of operation.
Not one guy went with them.
It was the Cuban that he brought with him, 17 all together with two Peruvians and one German.
The members from the Communist Party, the Raul Kispai, and the Paredo brother brought from the Communist Party.
That was all he had.
Okay?
Now, when Cuba sent him there, it was sent him to be killed.
Sheikh was pro Chinese.
Right.
And the Soviets had no interest that we will succeed anywhere in the world because it will be a revolution that will turn over in favor of Mao Zedong in China.
When he went to Africa in 1964 65, that he was in Africa, all the weapons that he received were from Red China.
Benigno told me that.
Nothing for the children.
Benigno.
Benigno and I became very close friends.
Benigno was Che's right hand man in Bolivia.
He was wounded once in Bolivia.
He was a captain at the time.
He was one of the three survivors of the guerrilla chain.
He was the only one of the three who defected to Paris later on and wrote a book about the Cuban Revolution, against the Cuban Revolution.
I was in Bolivia after the whole scene, I was in Bolivia three times.
First of all, with BBC of London to do a documentary.
The second one was with Telemundo, Channel 51 here from Miami.
And the third one was SICK from Portugal.
Now, when Telemundo, I had to go two times.
One, we did, no, I was SICK of Portugal.
I went to Bolivia once.
They did a documentary, my visit with SHAE.
Then, the second year of the anniversary, they wanted to do something about SHAE, but they already had run this first one.
So they call it El Reencuentro, the reencounter.
So they put two enemies together that fought in Bolivia against each other, the way they claimed they have seen each other, who have killed each other.
Now they are together in Paris on the same side, fighting for the same cause.
Because Benito defected and he was against Castro in Paris, and he was against Paris.
So they flew me to Paris at that time, and we had the meeting at Ileana de la Guardia, the daughter of Tony de la Guardia.
Who's married to Massetti, that Argentinian, and her apartment, his apartment, which is in front of a restaurant called Amore Italiano.
And they had a real encounter.
They had Benigno waiting for me in his apartment with one camera behind him, then one camera followed me.
And when I entered the room for the first time, I saw each other, we shook hands and we sat and we started talking.
So they have a genuine gathering together, two people who know each other, which was interesting.
After that, we became very close friends.
To the point that every year I will go twice, at least twice, to Paris.
He picks me up at the airport and I'll go to his home.
I stay and sleep at his home in an expert room that they had, and his wife will cook for me the whole time.
And I spent three days without going anywhere, only talking to him.
The last day I used to tell him, if I don't see the Eiffel Tower and the Arch of Trump, I haven't been in Paris.
So he drove me to his little car, we go to see the Eiffel Tower, the Arch of Trump, and then we went to see my daughter, who used to live there for five years near the Senate, to her apartment there, and then back home to his home.
We became very, very close friends.
Then, after everybody did the interview with him, he wanted to talk to me alone.
And then we spoke.
He told me at the time, he said, Look, the guy who really hated you was Raul Castro, not Fidel, for whatever reason.
And he said, We were close to killing you several times.
He told me, we never knew about it, that they sent Captain Jesus Bermudez Coutinho, who later became a general to Vietnam, to assassinate me.
He had two Vietnamese, another PU and two Vietnamese with him.
One Vietnamese, they claimed, was working at the U.S. Embassy, spoke fluent English.
And they said one time that they were trying to follow me in the car.
Too fast.
They couldn't keep up with my car.
And second time, it was very heavily guarded.
I don't recall it.
Yes, I flew.
When I drove, I drove very fast with my driver.
That's true.
And the only time that I could call, they might call, I had a bodyguard, which I didn't, is that we had an operation in the south of Saigon.
I was staying at the Duke Hotel in Saigon.
The PRU will come to my hotel in fully geared because so will I.
I will be in full uniform with M16 and everything.
And then we will go in several gyps.
To the operational area, we were going to launch an operation.
Yeah, but not because I was heavily guarded, because everybody was up to here with ammunition and hand grenades and everything, because we were going to an operation, not to guard me or anything like that.
And then they also, he knew knowledge when they tried to hijack the plane there.
And then they claimed another time that they sent Gorriaran Melus to assassinate me in Miami.
He was lucky that I was in Miami at the time I went to Beirut in 75.
It coincided with the same time.
And then this guy told the Cuban government that the CIA became aware of the life attendant in my life and they took me out of Miami.
We never learned anything.
I just went out because they had this thing to go in Beirut.
So it was luck, also.
So I asked him later on, Why did you select me?
Because all of us have basically the same training.
I had a little bit more because I was in the Dominican Republic and the Communist League of the Caribbean before, but that's it.
The rest is the same.
He told me, At the end of every interview, he will tell you, If I select you, when will you be ready to be mobilized?
People will tell me, I need a day, a week, whatever.
Time they needed.
My answer to him was okay, if we have time, I take my car, I go to my home, say goodbye to my wife, to my two kids, pick up my clothes, I come and we go.
It's not time for that, I will call here to my wife Rosa and tell her I have to go.
If it's not time for that, let's go and I'll give you her number and you call her and you tell her I had to go.
He said nobody had told him that.
That was the reason, really basic point, he selected me.
So we went to Bolivia and For some reason, I was assigned to work directly with the head of the 8th Division Headquarters, Colonel Centeno Anaya.
He was the commander of the region, military region, where Che was operating.
My friend, Gustavo Villolo, stayed with the battalion that had been trained at La Esperanza, Old Sugar Mill.
There was a special forces unit training what was called the 2nd Ranger Battalion of the Bolivian, about 600 to 800 men.
With the maximum weapons, they were used the same.
Same Garand that the US Army was using at the time, because there was no M16 at the time.
They were using that, they were using carabines, M2 for the officer, everything that we had, everything.
They were being really trained, because the Bolivian troops were terrible.
The first combat was a disaster.
The soldiers were captured, they were taking their uniform, their booth, and they were sent back with underwear only and the weapon, everything away.
So they trained a special battalion.
So, when I was an advisor of the 8th Division headquarters with General Colonel Centeno Anaya, the head of intelligence, Hernando Saucedo, whenever they had a capture of some guerrilla, I would go with him.
They captured some document, I went with him to do the exploitation or intelligence of the documentation.
So, we were lucky at one point in time when they had a prisoner called Paco C. Castillo Chavez.
Now, before we went to Washington, we went through some reading in Washington.
About everything had to do with the guerrilla to familiarize what we were facing when we got in there.
In there were the transcripts of the interrogation they had of Regis Debray and Ciro Bustos, the two, one Argentinian and one Frenchman that were captured with the guerrilla.
They spoke a lot of them.
So I knew during those interrogatories that Paco was a communist from the Bolivian party who wanted to leave the guerrilla.
He was a communist indeed, but he was offered to go to Cuba and Russia.
And by the time he was ready to go, thinking he was going to go to this place a day, and he drove to this place thinking a plane would take him to Uruguay or Paraguay and then give him documentation to go to Cuba, he was given a rifle.
And he was not a guerrilla.
And he was more of an intellectual, even though he didn't look like one.
And he had a tremendous memory.
He can tell you meetings that took place six months ago, the address of the building, and the name of 15 people that were there.
The guy was fantastic.
So there is an encounter where they killed basically everybody in the guerrilla except two.
That's Tanya, the famous guerrilla, the Italian officer from West Germany that was killed in that operation.
She was the girlfriend of Shea, and she was sent actually by the Soviets to keep tab on Shea.
And there are two survivors Ernesto Maimoud and this guy, Paco, Jose Castillo Chavez.
I was able to save the life of Paco.
Now, Ernesto Maimoud at that night, he didn't have even a bullet in his body.
He became arrogant with the arm and they shot him before they brought him to Valle Grande.
They brought Paco back.
Paco has a couple of bullets here, but nothing to be worried about.
So I flew with the Mayor Saseo, the head of intelligence, into Valle Grande in a Bolivian Air Force plane.
I talked to the guy, the guy had a tremendous memory.
Fantastic.
So they were ready to kill him.
When I went to the headquarters, Colonel Sellis was telling General Davila Fuente they already interrogated this guy.
He could not contribute anymore, giving the word.
They already told the president he was badly wounded.
So I interfered with them.
I asked the general, who knew that I had documentation from the president and the commander in chief of the armed forces, General Obando Candia.
When we both arrived, when three Americans were waiting for us and the two of us arrived in La Paz, they took us directly to the house of the president Barriento.
He gave us a D card to give all the support we requested.
And then they took us to the minister of defense, who gave us a similar D card that we should receive any support that we requested from any authority, civilian or military.
And also they were giving ID cards captain in the Bolivian army.
Three of us, the American and the two of us.
So here we are.
We had Paco.
I flew him finally back to Santa Cruz.
And we put him in a room where I interrogated him.
I helped him.
First of all, I got a nurse to come from the hospital.
I paid her to treat him because he wasn't allowed to go to the hospital.
She had all kinds of worms, thousands of worms in there.
She told me that saved his life because he would eat all of the things, otherwise, he got gangrena.
And then she got something to put in there that they put to the pigs, and there were thousands of this little thing coming out, dying.
Maggots?
Yeah, the thousand.
But there was something, a very small worm in there.
Maggots.
Yeah, but they finally got them out with that thing that they put on pigs, really.
It's purple color, a lot of that liquid.
And then they injected him with antibiotics and they saved his life, really.
And I allowed him to communicate with his mother and I brought some newspaper.
He was very, very, very, very cooperative with me.
Fantastic.
He gave us exactly, and that's how we learned how Shay moved around the area.
Whenever he went from point A to point B, he would send, they had a group of what they call the Vanguard.
Six guerrillas will go one kilometer ahead of him.
He will be in the middle with the head of the guerrillas and then five or six guerrillas in the back.
One kilometer behind.
In case there is an ambush, he will be protected in the middle.
He could maneuver out of the ambush.
So, in late September, last day of September of 1967, there was an encounter of a lieutenant, Eduardo Garindo Granchant.
He was a lieutenant from the regular army, which is regular troops, who had an encounter with Shea and they were able to kill three members of the vanguard.
Guerrilla Encounters in Bolivia00:15:43
And they advised us in Santa Cruz, say, look, there are three bodies coming up to the city of Pucara.
We're just passing Valle Grande, so you can come pick up the body and see who they are.
So, Saucedo and I, the head of intelligence, we drove all the way to Pucará.
We waited five o'clock in the afternoon.
Here comes Lieutenant Galindo with three mules and three bodies on top of the three mules.
So, when I look at the three bodies and took the documentation, one of them was Coco Peredo, who was the leader of the guerrilla on the Bolivian side.
The other one was Miguel, whose real name was a Cuban captain.
Hernandez Osorio, Manuel Hernandez Osorio, and the other one was another Bolivian who was a doctor.
Three of them.
And when you look at the documentation that Paco was giving them, three of them were the vanguard of Cher.
And then when I talked to Lieutenant Galindo, I said, Mi Capitan, I saw the guerrilla in the distance.
I started preparing my ambush, and the guerrilla surprised me.
They did what?
Surprising.
The other dead was Mario Gutierrez Hardaya, who was a Bolivian doctor.
The three dead.
They were members of the Vanguard.
And he said, what he saw was Che Guevara's group in the distance.
The Vanguard was already coming up the hill.
Right.
That confirmed what Paco Batolo said that was Che there.
So when I go back, it was the very end of September, I go back to see Colonel Centeno and say, the chase there, we have to move the battalion.
My name was Felix Ramos.
I said, Felix, you only have two weeks for graduation.
They already finished the training.
They're going to be shooting to see who got the highest mark in shooting.
The president is going to come to issue diplomas, sign.
By the president to all of them.
I said, Mi Coronel, we know that Shea is there.
And I explained to them what Paco has told us and what this guy told me.
Definitely Shea was there.
I said, Mi Coronel, now we know where he is.
In two weeks, we have no idea where he is.
So I convinced him.
So he ordered the battalion to stand down the training immediately to go to the area of operations.
So they had four companies.
One company stayed in Valle Grande, where I stayed with my friend.
They stayed there to maintain the communication, the supply of weapons and food to the battalion operation.
One company of less than 200 men was commanded by Captain Raul Lopez Leighton.
He was assigned along the Rio Grande, so the unit could not, the guerrilla could not move to the other side.
We could operate anywhere in the country, but the other side represented the 4th Division headquartered with Colonel Teran, different from different areas of operation from us.
And these people were already used to and they respected Colonel Centeno and Aya in 8th Division.
So they didn't want to go to Requeteran on the 4th Division, so they put a company there to make sure they didn't cross the river.
Then one company was put in reserve by Captain Celso Torrelio, who later became president of Bolivia.
And this captain was in the last place where Che was being seen, was Higueras, to react and support the company that was doing the search, the Gary Prado Solomon.
They started basically the first day of October, moving into the operational area.
Here comes the first weekend, okay?
It is Sunday, the 8th of October.
On Saturday, the 7th, we learned that later, on Saturday, which is the 7th, my friend had trained a special unit.
A Bolivian unit in intelligence.
Soldiers that spoke the different languages Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani.
And those people were sent in civilian clothes with no weapon ahead of the battalion to talk to the civil population.
It was easier for them to communicate in civilian clothes.
They see a military sometimes, they resent it.
So these people went ahead of the battalion to get the intelligence for the battalion.
And they came back that evening on Saturday and said, Look, a farmer has an hortaliza, you know, where he cultivates some.
Some tomatoes or whatever, and he said the guerrilla is right there.
He gave the location in the map.
All of them are located there right now.
So that night, Gary Proud surrounded with his 200 and some men.
He's around a Quebrada Judo, 600 men, completely.
That was on Sunday morning, he started advancing, moving in later.
That's when the firefight took place.
And then all hell broke loose.
All right.
I was in, my friend had a girlfriend, I understand, in Santa Cruz, they wanted to go there, so he left for the weekend.
I was the only one who stayed.
And what I took the time was I know there were three AT 6 combat aircraft that had the capability of firing a 50 caliber machine gun and a 2.75 rocket.
But those planes didn't have any communication with the ground troops because they had PRC 10 radios that communicated on 55 megahertz.
And the planes that the Bolivians have were working on VHF, 100 and some megahertz.
They cannot talk to each other.
So I borrowed three PRC 10 radios from the Army and I started installing one next to every pilot.
There's one pilot in front, one in the back.
So they'll be able to talk to the ground, be able to help them get air to ground support.
If they don't talk to each other, they cannot do that.
I had just been finished, that was Sunday, I was just been finished.
I was working on the third plane when Saucedo, Xen, Semi Capitan, just got word from the operational area, the papa cansado, daddy is tired, which means that the head of the guerrilla is captured alive.
I think he's wounded.
But we don't know whether it's Che Guevara or it's Inti Peredo, Coco's brother, who is the head of the guerrilla on the Bolivian side.
So I stood in the back of the second plane.
Major Serrate, the head of operation, went in the back of the pilot of the first plane.
We took off.
So we flew over the operational race.
So when my radio, they told us, Papa Cansado es el extranjero, it's the foreigner.
So we know it was Shay that was captured alive.
So we came back, informed that to Colonel Centeno.
He dispatched, we had one small helicopter, shitty helicopter.
It was one long seat for three people, and the pilot was only one seat in the middle.
Very small helicopter.
He sent that helicopter with Lieutenant Colonel Andres Celis to go to the operational area and try to secure all of Che Guevara's documentation so the people will not take it like souvenirs, shit like that.
Right.
So the helicopter went, dropped him, the operational area came back.
The pilot was a major from the Bolivian Air Force called Jaime Nino de Guzman, the commander of the helicopter pilot, the major.
So that night I had a couple of battles of Escoish and I had no better time.
Valentino was a teacher, one of the two.
I brought it up and we had a big drink for the finish of the guerrillas in Bolivia.
That's what Centeno told them that finally peace is going to come to his country after that.
He foresees that was the end of the guerrillas in there.
And then I asked him if I could go with him.
Everybody wanted to go with him.
Now, because of the helicopter, it would carry four people altogether, including the pilot.
But because of the altitude of where we were, it would only take the pilot and two more.
Colonel Centeno, somebody else.
There was a lieutenant colonel, all the others were major, I was captain, but I had an excellent relationship with all of them, so I asked him if I could go with him.
So Centeno spoke to all his officers after we had a drink with all of them and said, Look, I know that all of you want to go, but I want you to understand, Captain Ramos, this guy has done a lot of harm to come to Ramos' country.
You don't mind, we'll take him with you.
Everybody agreed.
So I am also a radio operator.
I have an RS 48, a little briefcase where I transmit in telegraphy, in code.
So that night, I sent a message to Washington through an embassy nearby, telling them, Look, Chase captured alive.
You have told me to keep him alive.
If you still want to keep him alive, move at the highest level because these people are not keeping any prisoner.
And I asked for another contact, permanent contact, which they refused, but they gave me a contact another day in the morning, about 10 o'clock in the morning or something like that.
So I guess I didn't sleep at all.
It was 5 o'clock in the morning.
I was ready.
I went to the wrong way, waited for them.
At 7 o'clock in the morning, we took off in the helicopter.
Centeno and I, I was sitting on his right, the pilot, Jaime and Iva Guzman, half an hour flying time, we landed right in front of the house of Laigueras, a schoolhouse.
Now, what they present now, the area where Shedd died, is not that the place, because the Bolivian army destroyed completely the old building where he was.
Now, the Cuban government rebuilt that in concrete, which is not the original, it's the same area, it's completely a different building.
So we landed next to the original Bindi.
They were waiting for him, all the officers.
You know, Selish, who had all the documentation, Shane, and back, Ayoroa, who was the executive of the battalion, all the captains were waiting for him.
So we went into the room.
I accompanied the colonel and three or four other officers with him.
We entered the room.
The door is here, the wall is right here, and there's another door here for another room in there.
And there is a little window on this side.
The other room doesn't have any window in front, it has a little window on the back side on the left.
So we enter in here.
The first thing that I see in front is the dead body of two Cubans.
They had the two bodies of his friend, two captains that died in combat that day.
They put him right inside the same room on the back of the wall.
And Che was tied down under this little window here, hands and legs.
So Centeno started asking a question.
He looked at him and didn't say a word.
Nothing.
To a point that Colonel Centeno said, Look, you invaded my country.
The least you should have the courtesy of answering me.
Nothing.
So he was bad.
He left the room with all of us.
Then I asked him, Coronel, can you give me his documentation?
I'd like to photograph it from my government.
So he turned to Colonel Sellis and told him, Give Captain Ramos here, you're back.
Now, he had already taken, but I didn't find the passport.
The Colonel had already put it in his pocket.
I didn't see the passport.
But he had inside there a big book made in Germany.
It was written in January, February, and the number was in German numbers, but it was written in Spanish.
That was his diary.
He also had a little booklet, a black booklet, that was type reading messages in Spanish, signed by Ariel.
That message that he received from Cuba.
Now, he could not transmit to Cuba.
Cuba, I think, purposely sent the only transmitter they sent was in a right broken.
So he could not communicate with Cuba.
He could only receive a message, but he could not send any message to Cuba.
And he had the code book.
The code book had been given to him by Red China.
The Chinese have their codes in numbers, numeric codes.
So there are little booklets like this.
It looks like this high, one inch and a half, or one inch and a half, and this high, and you have glue around, and it's numbers.
One, a group of four numbers, one in red and one in black.
One for ciphering, one for deciphering.
It's more complicated because you have to write a letter, then that letter corresponds to a number.
It's almost impossible to do.
The second hour, it was a letter, it's more simpler, but the same thing, it's impossible to decipher.
When these letters are random, there is no computer who will decipher that.
So he had that for Chinese.
There are several, like eight or ten books like that in different colors.
Then he also had some medicaments for his asthma.
Some picture of his family in there.
He had asthma?
Yeah, yeah, he had asthma.
But not when he was with me, he didn't have any asthma attack.
But he has asthma, he has equipment in there for the asthma.
So I got all of this, I went to a room they call Altelegrafi.
That's an area where they have one telephone line.
Later on, when I went back with BBC of London and the other people, there was nothing.
Okay?
They don't have any communication out of Viguera.
At that time, they had one telephone in a room that communicated with Slime all the way through the jungle to the Valle Grande, this crank thing.
Lousy, but you can understand, more or less, okay?
To be able to do one line at a time.
So I stayed there.
I put a table out in the middle where there was the sun.
And I took my camera.
I had my Pentax camera with a bunch of film.
I used all my film of 35 millimeter.
Fortunately, I have the Minox German camera and the roll that I had 40 pictures each.
I had a bunch of rolls.
So I was able to photograph completely the diary, every single page of the diary that he wrote when there.
In the middle of that, I interrupted.
I went back to the room where he was.
So I stood in front of him and said, Che Guevara, I'd like to talk to you.
He looked at me very arrogant and said, Nobody talks to me.
Nobody interrogates me.
So when I saw that attitude, I said, Comandante, I didn't come here and interrogate you.
I'd like to talk to you.
I admire you.
You used to be head of a state in Cuba, and you're here because you believe in your ideals, even though I know they are mistaken.
I just came here to talk to you.
Did you really admire?
He talked to me for a while to see if I was making a laugh of him, if I was laughing.
When he saw that I was serious, He said, Can you untie me?
Can I sit?
I said, Sure.
So I called, Soldado, see my capitan.
He came in.
Quita la jamarra, comandante Guevara.
The guy looked like, Que le quita la jamarra, comandante Guevara.
You know, untie Commander Guevara.
So they untied him.
I had a little chair and got a little bench on this side.
We got the bench and we helped him because he could hardly move all of that time.
And he had a bullet in here, through here.
He had been, he had been, a new gauge, white, was very clean, was put on, but you could still the blood coming out a little bit.
From the side there.
The only win.
Nothing, nothing serious, really.
So we sat here in the bench, and then he and I started talking.
Now, whenever I asked him anything that was of tactical interest to us, he would tell me and say, You know, I cannot answer that.
So I went along with that.
We continued to talk about different things.
At one point in time, he started telling me that the Cuban economy is in shambles because of the embargo, American embargo.
I look at him and say, I say, Commander, that's ironic that you tell me that.
He said, Why?
Because you were the minister of commerce in Cuba.
You were the president of the Cuban National Bank.
You are not even an economist.
He said, Do you know how I became president of the National Bank?
He said, I have no idea.
He said, I was sitting one time listening to Fidel.
I was talking to Camilo Cienfuegos.
I understood that Fidel was asking for a dedicated communist.
I raised my hand.
And he was asking for a dedicated economist.
So, in my opinion, I thought he doesn't want to answer the answer.
But then when I met Benigno in Paris, he told me he was right.
He said, Felix, I was with them.
Because Benino was also, it was at one point in time in La Sierra Maestra, he was working with Camilo Cienfuegos, not with Shea.
He said he understood that Fidel was asking for a dedicated communist, and he wrote his hand.
Fidel was asking for a dedicated communist, and that's how he became president of the National Bank and Minister of Commerce, Industry.
He heard communists when he was asking for an economist.
Then he continued to talk at one point in time, and then I told him about when you were in Africa, you had the Africans, they told me, were very poor soldiers.
Oh, I want to talk about that.
I said, Well, you don't want to talk about it.
Combat Stories from Paris00:15:30
Your own people have said that you had like 10,000 guerrillas, and they were very poor soldiers.
So he looked at me and said, Well, if I had 10,000 guerrillas, it would have been different.
But you're right, they were very poor soldiers.
And then, as you don't think, the only time he admitted that.
Then we talked about it.
He said, Why do you select Bolivia?
He had the three criteria why he selected Bolivia.
First of all, in his mind, imperialists in the United States will not be that much interested in a very poor country like Bolivia.
Bolivia had no real rich resources for the United States.
If it was Venezuela with oil, yes.
But Bolivia don't even have port.
They felt the United States would not be that much interested in putting so many things in a country that doesn't mean anything economically.
Second, they knew the Bolivian army was very poorly trained.
Absolutely right.
That's why the beginning was a total disaster.
A third, most important to him, Bolivia has boundaries with five different countries.
If you take Bolivia, He could export the revolution border to border with Brazil, with Argentina, with Paraguay, with Chile, and Peru.
With all five different countries.
That was the most important thing.
So we talk about, you know, very things.
At one point in time, he looked at me and said, You are not Bolivian.
The commander, who do you think I am?
He said, Well, you can either be a Puerto Rican or you can be a Cuban.
And by the question you have been asking me, you are working for the United States Intelligence Service.
I said, Yes, I was a member of the.
Bay of Peak infiltration team, saying, What's your name?
He was interested in my name because they had an infiltrator with the infiltration team where I was.
His name was Benigno Perez.
He was a lieutenant in the Cuban army who allegedly had defected to us.
And he was part of the infiltration team.
His team, when landed, everybody was captured.
And then people saw him, they promoted him to captain in captain uniform of the rebel uniform, going to a different prison after the Bay of Peak to see if he could identify.
Person like me that were in prison because he knew our faces and he knew our true name.
But we went in Cuba with fake names.
So we raised her in a prison because we were captured, we were giving them the documentation, which is not our true name.
So, they were using him to go through the different prisons to see if he could identify people like me.
Wow.
Benigno Perez.
But I didn't know what was going to happen to him, so I say Felix, and Felix really didn't mean anything to him at all.
So, we started to continue to wait to see what happened.
Now, when Centeno came, before that, I got a phone call from a lady.
No, Centeno was in the operational area still.
During the combat, it was going.
You could hear the mortar fire and the shooting and all of that from where we were.
Here comes a little lady and said, First of all, came the line.
Mi capitan, there is a phone call for the highest ranking officer, which is you.
We have two lieutenants here, you are the only captain.
So I go to that, we call Telegrafida, the area where I made the photograph, the diary.
And then they say, I think it was outside because of very poor communication, say, 500, 600, order from the high commander, 500 and 600.
We had a very simple call 500 Che Guevara, 600 dead, 700 keep him alive.
I asked twice, 500, 600, the one I had killed.
So when Centeno came before he left, I called him and said, I said, Coronel, there is an order from your high Bolivian command to eliminate the prisoner.
We received the order 500, 600 from your people.
My instruction from my government is to try to keep him alive at all costs.
It's very important for us.
We'll have a helicopter and plane to fly him to Panama for interrogation.
He looked at me and said, Felix, we have worked empirically.
We're very grateful to you.
But this is an order from my president, my commander in chief.
He looked at his watch and said, When I leave, the helicopter is going to come several times, bringing food and ammunition and taking our wounded and our dead.
After 2 o'clock in the afternoon, it's going to come to pick up Che Guevara's dead body.
You can justify him any way you want because we know how much harm he has done to your country.
I said, Coronel, try to make them change their mind because it's very important to us, but I give you my word of honor that if there is not a counter audit, I will bring you the dead body of Che.
Then he told me, I said, You can justify him any way you want.
Because we know how much harm you have done to your country.
And he left.
Sure enough, the helicopter came.
One time, that's what that picture was taking.
Because I never even thought about getting a picture with him.
I was talking to him when here came the pilot, Jaime Ningwuzman, and said, Capitan, Mayor Subsea, I want a picture with the prisoner.
And he got the 35 millimeter camera from the head of intelligence.
So I look and I say, Commander, do you mind?
He said, No.
So when we helped him, I was the one who helped him.
I called him.
He was limping a little bit because of the bullet he had in his leg.
We went around the schoolhouse.
We sat in there.
This is right now.
The door is in this way here, about here.
This is the little bit of wall that is not even a building behind that.
This is empty behind this.
Okay.
And I gave my camera to the pilot, Jaime Neyo Guzman, and he was the one who took the picture.
Just before that picture was taken, I put my hand around the chair and said, Comandante, mir el pajarito.
Look the little bird.
We tell that in Cuba, to look at the bird, look at the pajarito, to take a picture.
And he was laughing.
To get kids to smile?
No, he was laughing.
He laughed.
And I looked at the camera.
I thought, actually, when I sent this picture to the CIA, who was embedded in one of the roles that I put in X, I told the guy from the agency in La Paz, I said, look, this is a roll of picture of me with Shay when Shay is laughing.
Because I thought he was laughing at the time the picture was taken.
But he changed for that expression.
Seconds before that, he was laughing like hell.
What was the conversation like between you and Shay after you got the order that he needed to be killed?
No, I didn't tell him anything.
You didn't tell him anything?
No, no.
I started waiting to see what happened.
I went back, we spoke several times on and off.
Wasn't there a moment?
No, let me tell you, even I thought, you know, in myself, talking to myself, all right, they want him alive.
How about if I call the landline, telephone line, when the helicopter comes, and I tell the pilot that my government convinced your government to keep him?
We just got a phone call, said to change order that my government were able to convince your government to keep him alive.
And if they tried to call a code line, they could not communicate.
But maybe, maybe yes, maybe no.
Then I thought to myself, hey, remember what happened with Fuen Batista released Fidel that December, what happened to Cuba?
And I told myself, you are here, actually, you're here to advise, not to be the commander.
And I told myself, if you do that and you are successful and he's released eventually and he goes to another country, a lot of people get killed because of him, you are going to be responsible.
And that's not your responsibility.
It is the responsibility of the Bolivian.
Let history run its course.
So I didn't do anything else to save his life at all.
And then I started waiting to see what happened.
Then the helicopter was gone.
Here came this lady, about, I don't know, it was 12 30, 12 40 in the afternoon with the radio.
Mi capitan, mi capitan, why are you going to kill him?
I said, Senora, why do you say that?
I said, look, we just saw you being photographed with him in front of the schoolhouse.
Look.
The radio already gave the news that he died from combat wounds and he was still alive.
So at that time, you know, there's not going to be any counter orders.
So I got into a room, I stood in front of him, he was sitting on the bench.
He looked at me, I looked at him.
He said, Commander, I'm sorry, I tried my best.
It's ordered from the High Bolivian Command.
That guy looked at me and he turned white like a piece of paper.
I had never seen somebody whose face turned white, I mean, literally white.
Like the blood had drained out of his face.
He didn't move a mask.
And then he said, It's better this way.
I should have never been captured alive.
And then he got the pipe and said, I'd like to give this pipe to a soldadito who treated me well.
Now he had the pipe.
When I arrived, he wanted to smoke.
He didn't have picadura from tobacco.
So I asked a soldier to give me a couple of cigarettes.
So he got the regular cigarette.
He opened it up and put what was inside the cigarette inside the pipe.
And then he smoked with me.
I allowed him to smoke from cigarette because we didn't have a pipe, a smoke for the pipe.
So I wanted to, then I said, at that point in time, when he said that Sergeant Teran, he knew was the one executing people, burst into the room.
Yo quiero la pipa, mi capitán, yo quiero la pipa.
And Che, digo, no, ti no te la doy.
Digo, salga de aquí.
Que yo quiero la pipa, mi capitán, salga de aquí.
Che had the pipe here when he went out and said, I look at him and say, Commander, would you give it to me?
He's offered a few seconds and said, I will give it.
So I got the pipe, I put it here.
It's anything you want for your family.
Then I would say, in a sarcastic way, he said, Well, If you can't tell Fidel that he will soon see a triumphant revolution in America.
And then he said, and you can tell my wife to remarry and try to be happy.
That was the last way.
So very emotional.
And me, especially, because I have never ordered anybody who is in prison being killed.
This was a very unique and very unusual circumstances.
So it was emotional, tremendously for me, that moment in C.
So we look at his shoulder, he came to where I was, we shook hands, look at his shoulder face, he embraced me, I embraced him hard.
Then he left goal.
He stood in attention.
I looked at him.
I went back.
I shook his arm again.
I embraced him and I left.
And it was hard.
I hope I never had to go through that again.
And then I went out.
It was Sergeant Terran who was next to the other officers in there.
And I told him, I said, Sergeant, do not, they're ordered from High Bolivian Command to eliminate the prison.
Don't shoot from here up.
Shoot from here down because this man's supposed to die from combat.
See me, Capitan.
See me, Capitan.
It was exactly.
One o'clock in the afternoon, because I looked at the watch when I left.
I walked toward the area where I was photographing the diary.
I sat on the bench taking some notes.
At 1 15, I heard a short burst of machine gun fire.
It was an M2 carabine.
He borrowed, because the soldier has a regular garment, he borrowed the automatic, full automatic M2 carabine from Lieutenant Perez, who was next to him.
It wasn't Lieutenant, it was very, very, very short, very small.
And it was one.
1 15, I took note.
Then I went in there, you know, I would say for a long time, maybe two, three hours later.
Here come Gary Prado and Cesar Torelli, two captains.
And then I joined them and we go into the room.
When we arrived in the room, his body was like this sideways.
This door was like this.
His head looking at the ceiling.
The two dead bodies were still there and his face was covered with mud.
Now, the floor is dirt, it's mud in there, very humid.
The walls were made out of clay, dirt, mixed with a little stone and some things from the trees.
That's the way they mix together.
And it's very, very insulating.
It really keeps the cold out or keeps the heat out.
It's very, very insulating.
And then, of course, they have the straw on top of it.
The wall itself had some straw and some small stone.
Of course, I brought a bunch of those stones later on when I went back, finally brought a bunch of that back home before they destroyed the house on the other side.
So here we are.
I asked them, I could hear the helicopter coming.
No, they don't know.
They and me, when they heard the helicopter coming, they left, both of them.
All right.
Now, when we came in, Celso Torreli had a little stick.
He said, You son of a bitch, you have killed so many of my soldiers.
And then we embraced on top of the body, and Gary Proud said, Mi capitan, hemos acabado con las guerrillas en América Latina.
We have finished the guerrilla in Latin America and told him, Capitan, if we have not finished them, at least we have delayed them for a long time.
Then, here the helicopter took off immediately.
So, I asked a soldier who was there to bring me a bucket of water because his face was covered with mud.
So, I got a bucket of water and I sat next to him.
I got up with my hand, I cleaned all his face.
I completely took all the blood out of his face, completely the mud out of his face.
I tried to close his jaw with my handkerchief, which I lost with the air of the helicopter.
It was successful in closing in there, but then I lost and it went back again.
I tried unsuccessfully to close the eyes several times, put it back in, went back on.
I've been up in more than two hours or so.
Is that normal?
Yes.
When you are so long, even you have to try to move an arm, you won't.
At the beginning, yes, you can move it.
If it was maybe a few minutes, you can keep it quiet and it will stay there.
When there are several hours, It's already frozen that way.
You can bring it down, but when you let it go, it goes up again.
So I couldn't close the eye.
This I could.
But then, with the air of the helicopter, I lose my handkerchief.
And when you see the picture, his jaw is down in there.
So I got the body.
The two captains left.
He didn't want the helicopter to see or anybody take a picture with him and the body.
I took the body on one side, two soldiers on the other side.
We took it to the left, right pontoon of the helicopter.
While I was trying to tie it down, El Mayor Nino Guzman, the pilot, said, Mi Capitan, move him forward to balance a little bit the helicopter.
Apparently, it's a little bit too deep.
So I put my hand under him.
It was a una camilla, a treasure under it, with plastic.
And I pulled it out.
When I got the hand out, I could not see it.
It was completely covered with blood.
Apparently, one of the bullets hit the aorta and it was a big pool of blood.
When this thing is plugged, it doesn't allow the liquid to go down, to drain down.
I didn't say a word, but I thought to myself, in my mind, there are persons that have a lot of blood in their hand.
I had a hell of a lot of it.
So I didn't say a word.
I just thought that it came to my mind.
Then I cleaned the blood on the right side of my pen.
I went down and continued to tie the helicopter, tie the thing around his.
Which I lost with the air of the helicopter.
I jumped into the helicopter a little bit to the left to balance the helicopter on the lone ship.
And at that point, a soldier came and said, Mayor, Mayor, Father Chiller wants to see him.
So we stayed like two, three minutes with the engine running.
Cleaning Blood from Pens00:18:12
Here comes this priest riding a mule all the way around.
He was fairly close to being decapitated because we were in a little bit lower ground than where he was coming from.
But just this much from the play, he came down from the mule.
He went a little bit closer and then twice.
He, he, which I took a picture of it with my Minux camera.
That's the only one that I have left.
I thought to myself, this guy was an atheist.
He didn't believe in God.
Nevertheless, he received the last ritual from the Catholic Church.
And then we took off.
And we took off for, um, and let me tell you, there were times that we were talking, I wasn't paying any attention.
Be honest with you.
I don't know what he was saying.
I was looking at this guy in front of me.
The guy looks like a beggar.
It's a guy who didn't have, uh, Proper clothes.
He had a jacket that was in racks, filthy.
The hair was filthy.
He didn't have any pair of boots.
He had some couple of leather very badly tied down to his foot, like shoes.
They weren't shoes.
To a point, you feel sorry for some individual like that.
I felt sorry for the guy.
And my mind, when he was talking, I wasn't even paying attention to what he was saying.
My mind was, I never met him personally, but I remember him when he visited the Soviet Union, when he visited Mao Zedong in China.
I remember that guy, which seems to me much taller than what he was right there now, with this big abrigo, you know, this overcoat with the leader of the Soviet Union and the leader of China, very arrogant talking.
And looking at this guy, it could not be the same person.
It's impossible.
I mean, it strikes so different to what I was looking at and what I knew or remember from him.
And that.
So it wasn't, it wasn't, but it was probably one of the hardest moments of my life to go through with that decision.
I knew I had to do it.
It was not a question about it.
I hope I never had to do it again.
I never will.
Hopefully.
Did you really respect him?
Did you, in that moment, did you have some respect for him?
When a guy accepts his faith and he died like a man, okay, for example, he took people in exile.
He would say, Oh, Sheikh Abara pleaded for his life.
He begged, he cried.
Bullshit, he didn't do that.
Other people will say, Cuba will say, for example, he talked to me and said, I don't talk treasure, and he is pitying me.
No.
We both treat each other with mutual respect all the time.
All the time.
Now, some of my friends will tell me and say, you know, if he had been the other way around, he wouldn't have treated you like that.
I say, I know.
But that's the difference between them and us.
It's a hell of a difference between what we fight for and what he fights for.
What kind of person was he?
How did he treat people?
How did he treat prisoners?
Well, Being captured, you take another personality.
You are.
You are.
You are down.
It's different when you are in power.
Now, I had some experience that tells his real character, tells a lot of who he really was.
For example, here in this museum about five years ago came a lady, and she came in a wheelchair.
She was the sister of a friend of mine who is a paratrooper during the Bay of Pig Castaño.
Their father was a captain in the Cuban police, the anti communist police called BRAC, Partido Represión Anticomunista, that Batista had.
It was specifically an anti communist unit.
And Fidel and Che hated them.
Now, he was a lieutenant in that unit, a very decent guy.
They had him to be executed.
But they allowed the family to visit him.
So she was telling me here one day, she said, Look, I went to visit my father on Saturday.
I get up normally about two, three o'clock in the morning.
To be at La Cabañas early, very early, because there will be a long, there will be hundreds of people to visit their families that were in prison.
So I arrived one of the first.
When I arrived, there were already people there.
We arrived at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, waiting in line.
By 11 o'clock in the morning, it was a huge line.
We were fairly in front.
There was a lady in front of her.
Che Guevara arrived about 11 o'clock in the morning.
He came in the jeep.
And this lady in front started yelling at Che Guevara.
And everybody said, Coño, calmate.
No, no, no.
She was so perceived that Che Guevara noticed her, and she came in the jeep.
Came down the jeep, Senora, que le pas usted?
What happened to you?
Then the lay to him, Commander, my son is 15 years old.
He's been in prison for two weeks.
He has done nothing.
He was not condemned to death penalty.
How old?
15. 15.
He was not condemned to death penalty.
He was just in prison for whatever he did.
Okay?
I haven't been able to sleep in two weeks.
Please release him.
You know, he's 15 years old.
He hasn't done nothing.
What is the name of your son?
Bring her son now.
So she waited.
The guy went, one of his soldiers went, they took a little while, came with the kid.
When the kid came, 15 years old, praying in front of her, he hit him on the face.
Hijo de puta, por tu culpa, tu madre lleva dos semanas on him because you are responsible for your mother not sleeping in two weeks.
Put out his pistol and shot him in the head in front of everybody.
And everybody in the line started calling him, hijo puta, asesino, comunista, son of a bitch, you assassin, communist.
That's the end of the visit today.
Everybody go home.
There is no visit for prisoners today.
So, everybody had to leave there.
That was the true Che Guevara.
And when you read his letter to his father, the first time that he had killed people, he wrote to his father, it's a matter of a Cuban record, that he found out that he enjoyed killing people.
Okay.
When I talked to a guy who trained him, he was a Cuban, which I met.
I became friends with him later on.
He was with me, even though I didn't see him at the time in the Dominican Republic in 1959.
He was working with the Dominican chief of intelligence, Avis Garcia.
He told me, he said, Felix, he was the one who trained Shea and Fidel and everybody in Mexico.
They call him El Correano, Miguel A. Sanchez.
They call him Correano because he was in the Korean War with the U.S. Army.
So, Carlos Prios Sogaraz, who was the former president of Cuba, who Batista deposed, paid him.
At the beginning, he was with Fidel before he went to the Sierra Maestra, paid him to go and train Fidel in Mexico, because this guy had experience, military experience from Korea.
He was the one who trained all of them.
He said, Felix, I knew all of them.
Che Guevara was nothing.
He was nobody in the training camp.
Nothing.
And he said, Let me tell you one thing Che will come to me because he knew that I was in Korea.
He will ask me several times.
You have been in combat, you have killed people.
What does it feel like when you shoot somebody, when you shoot your enemy, and you see the blood coming out?
He has a fascination to find out what was your feeling when you do that.
Back in training in Mexico, well, Correano.
So he had that from inside him all the time.
And he loved to give the coup d'etat shot in the head to the people that he could.
We enjoyed that.
What was your answer to that?
How does it feel to you when you?
Murdered.
It's not.
It's when you're in war.
When I arrived, I had a lot of this happened later on.
But I knew that he was an assassin.
I know that he killed a lot of my people.
But then it was a transformation what I had in my mind against him when I saw him.
It's not what I expected.
I saw a poor guy, a beggar, a guy who was being, he lost, who was really, really down.
You felt sorry as a human being.
You feel sorry when you see somebody like that.
And really, I forgot everything that he did against my people.
When you hear the guy who trained Che talk about Che's fascination with killing, with death, how does that compare to your experience with taking people's lives?
Well, I never take, I've taken people's lives in combat.
Right.
They're shooting at you and you're shooting them dead.
It's never, it's not execution, but it's still, it's still taking.
I never torture anybody.
A lot of people said in Vietnam, no, our people never torture anybody in front of me.
Okay?
We got more being nice to them.
Like, for example, the guy who we met in the position of Tutank, the guy who was firing the rocket into Saigon.
I was friendly with him.
He started working with us then, accompanying our units.
Okay?
He really was pissed off at them because they took him from the only male in the family.
Look, when I was in the helicopter and we put a strike right on top, he was sharing, like, yeah, you hit the target.
She's your friend.
You were with them maybe.
10 days ago, you were with them down there.
It's amazing the transformation of these people.
He was happy that we were killing his friend down there.
I couldn't understand that, really.
It's amazing.
I had some very interesting experience during my career with the Ains in different parts, and that was one of them.
To see this guy who just came out with them, he was supposed to be their brothers in there, and he would enjoy it when, yeah, you are on target, you're hitting the right target.
You can see, honestly, he was feeling good about that.
Maybe he had such a big resentment that they made him do that that he didn't want to do, that he expressed it that way.
Did it change you when you first started going into combat and even in like Vietnam, some of the things you had to do, you know, in firefights, seeing all the death, taking people's lives?
How did that affect you personally?
Did it become numb to it?
Let me tell you, to be honest with you, I didn't even talk about Sheikh when I was in Vietnam.
Sheikh was nothing.
It's amazing.
People think that was the biggest thing in my career.
That was the least thing in my career.
I know I contributed a hell of a lot more in Vietnam.
I had much more fulfillment in what happened in Vietnam than in Bolivia.
It was only one hour, two hours, three hours, four hours with him in there.
That's all.
And advising them.
It was nothing.
He was nobody at that time.
So a lot of people ask me, What do you feel when you saw Che?
Now, they are thinking in the Che that Cuban created in your image after he died.
He seemed the Che that they created in the man of people, the Superman, you know, that people admire, some people admire and love him, even though he was a criminal.
That the Che that I met, when Che was there, was nobody.
Nobody knew like him, like Che.
Nobody was using his t shirt or anything like that at that time.
It was nobody.
He was really a very, very poor gorilla.
He was the worst gorilla in the world when you look at it.
He could not even recruit a single farmer.
Benigno used to kid with me and say, Felix, the only guy that we recruited was a dog.
He left because we couldn't provide him with food.
Nobody ever joined him.
He went from whatever array he was in, people got killed or people defected from the guerrilla.
That was it.
But to me, when you look at my career, I always say, look, nobody talked about what I really did in Vietnam and other things.
Everybody wants to talk about Che Guevara.
And that's the least thing that I consider I did.
It was a matter of circumstances to be there where I went through.
But Bolivia were the ones who captured him.
By circumstance, I was there.
But it wasn't the highlight of my life, really, to be honest with you, at all.
Right.
My what?
The highlight of my life was Vietnam, when you look at it, really.
What you put accomplishing in El Salvador when I captured Nidia Diaz, the commander.
No, I mean, I guess what I was getting at was the amount of blood and the amount of death and suffering that you've seen in your life is more than.
Most people on earth, I mean, it's like the top one.
Let me tell you, the problem I had at home.
When I came back at home, my kids, for example, will have some fever.
Okay?
They had a cold and they had some high fever.
I didn't ask about them.
And my wife said, You don't love them.
I said, No, no, no.
I have been in the hospital all the time.
I see kids like them with no eyes, with no legs, with no hands.
You know, you're lucky that you have only a cold.
You're lucky that you only have a little bit of fever.
That's nothing.
It really, in a way, insensitizes you.
You know, I wasn't that.
She was very sensitive when my son had a fever, a high fever, or felt bad.
I didn't.
But I saw so many agonies of this little kid, same like my kid, even younger or older.
What they have gone through, my kid only had a cold.
You cannot, it's no comparison.
So, in a way, It didn't move me to see him with a call.
Yeah, I got a call.
Give him some medicament.
He will get rid of it.
It's nothing.
Which it was really nothing.
Right.
Now, perhaps if I hadn't gone through what I did, maybe I would be more worried about them.
And she used to tell me, You don't love them.
I said, I love them.
For you to see the people that I saw in Vietnam, this is nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Is the legend true that you have Che's watch?
No, no, no.
That's not the way it was.
No, I had bought in Miami.
Long before that, a GMT watch.
It's exactly the same as the one that they had.
So when I arrived in La Higuera, there was one soldier that had one of the watches.
Now, remember, there were about seven or eight GMT in there.
Every single Cuban Fidel gave a GMT watch.
Che and every one of them.
Later on, when I got the gush from this guy, I said, Look, I want to see inside to see if they have any microfilm.
So give it to me, I'll give it back to you.
My band was different from the original one because my band, when the original one went bad, I bought one which is not Rolex, pretty stronger.
So, what I did, I exchanged badges, I gave him my band with my watch, and I took his Rolex with my band.
He told me he took it from Che.
Bullshit.
He didn't take it from Che.
Che had two GMT watches with him his and the one Cuban who had died, that he was keeping the other Rolex to give it to the family.
I got the story directly from them.
And then Gary Prado cut both of them because they brought Chet to Gary Prado.
They cut his hands off, right?
Yeah, so that was later on.
Gary Prado had nothing to do with that.
That was the day after when they were trying to prove that Fidel indeed was, if Chet denied, he wanted to cut his head off.
I was the one who told, look, you're going to do that.
I said, why not?
You're the head of a state.
You can show the head of a human being.
But what do you suggest?
Cut one finger.
We had the fingerprint for the Argentinian federal police and they can be checked.
So he ordered both hands to be cut.
Okay, that was a different story.
But the watch actually was, Gary Proud had both of them, both watches.
Now, they told me, and I believe for many, many years, that when they captured Shea, Shea said, Don't shoot, I'm worse to you alive more than dead.
That's the story they believe in.
I wasn't there.
And that's the story that I gave before because that's what I believe it happened.
That's what they told me.
And that's why then Sergeant Terran told me that when he, When he shot Shea, he went into the room and Shea knew he was going to be killed, but I told him.
And he said, You're not going to kill me.
He said, No, no, no, we are not going to kill you.
You are worse to you, more alive than dead.
So, like repeating what he had said before.
Let me see.
To repeating what he has said before, it was not the case.
I had about 10 days ago a newspaper guy that I respect that interviewed the four soldiers that actually captured Che.
Because Gary Pardo was not present when they captured Che.
They brought him to him.
And he gave me the picture of the guys and done with.
I got all the documentation he gave me from these four guys.
These guys were the ones who captured Che.
And they claimed that Che was with Simeon Cuba Saravi.
I know that because they both were captured alive.
Simeon Cuba Saravia was another guerrilla like this, very small.
He had much more hair and more beard than Che.
Really, really tough, with a lot of hair.
And he was executed.
As a matter of fact, I was talking, I was photographing it directly when I hear some birds of fire.
I run into the room and look at Che, look at me.
I go to the next room and they had just shot Simeon Cuba Saravia.
He didn't have even a bulletin, he had not been wounded at all.
And what happened was these two guys said they were very close because, and then, They jumped on Che, all four of them.
The only thing Che said, no, Knowing him, but that's what they said and I respected that.
It was lie.
It was a lie to try to put him down, but he didn't say that.
The Lie About Castro00:14:58
Going back to the beginning, we glossed over a little bit, but I wanted to talk about the, the mission that you went on when they shipped you over to Cuba to assassinate Castro.
What was that like when they, when they sent you over there and the mission ultimately failed?
That went through the same way, the following way.
We were in Panama.
We just moved from Guatemala to Panama for additional training.
So, a friend of mine, Segundo Borja, and myself, we talked to each other and said, Look, why do we volunteer to kill Castro?
That would shorten the war tremendously and save lives.
Yeah, let's do it.
So, we went to see an American who was in charge of training in there.
And we told him, Look, we'd like to participate in getting rid of Castro.
We'd like to see if it's possible we can shoot them.
Who did you say?
He took note.
That was it.
Okay.
Never talked to us again.
Then we finished the training.
They flew us, actually, the plane as if we landed in Guatemala for one night.
And then they took us to a home of the owner of the plantation in there for one night.
Then we flew back to Miami and they put us in a motel in Homestead, which is secluded, nothing around.
It's just trees all over the place.
It's farms all around there.
One motel was a big swimming pool, huge swimming pool, where we used to practice with the RB12, RB10, you know, there's more plastic that we were supposed to use to land.
Well, I was there, I was called and said, okay, your operation has been approved.
So they brought a rifle, I believe it was a German rifle.
When a telescope inside was in a box, it was not attached to the rifle.
They told me how to attach it.
And they told me, once you do it, don't touch it.
It's already sighted to the distance you're going to shoot Fidel.
They knew that I had no idea where I was going to do it from.
But apparently, they knew the idea was from the Edificios of Mayan to the Presidential Palace.
They knew exactly the distance.
They have zero in that side to that thing.
So somebody went there beforehand?
And they gave me, no, they, I don't know.
How they got it, I have no idea.
But they told me it was already pre-sided to this that you're going to choke.
The other speculation on my part.
Then Segunda and I, and then they added one more man to our team, a radio operator, was Javier Soto.
He later, he just retired.
He was a senator for the state of Florida, local, state of Florida, not federal.
And he also was, until a year ago, the commissioner of Dade County for 15, 20 years.
He was my radio operator.
Segunda, Boris, myself.
And then we lit a box of 10 or 20 rounds.
You only use maybe one, two, or three.
If you're lucky, three.
Okay, maybe only one.
You don't use that many when you better do on the first shoot.
So they gave us the rifle.
Then they took up, we went to the middle of the quay.
A boat was waiting for us, and then they took to a bigger boat.
It was the only time that boat was used for an operation.
It was a luxurious yacht from a millionaire.
Later on, we were told, we didn't learn then.
Later on, they told me that was the boat that belonged to Sergeant Schreifer, a relative of President Kennedy.
Oh, really?
It was a Ukrainian, Romanian crew and one American captain.
In charge of the plane.
It was in late January.
We went the first time.
We went in, we got right to Varadero Beach.
There was supposed to be a boat waiting for us to bring us in and then take us to a safe house and then take us to the area.
Okay, we were in the hands of the resistance when we got in there.
There was nobody waiting for us, so we came back again.
They waited for several days or whatever.
Then I think it was in February, we went back again.
The second time in the area where it was supposed to be because it was a huge boat, but it was a huge boat.
It could not be.
It was like 100 feet longer, wood, painted blue.
Nobody on board.
I remember everybody was with the machine gun.
We all have Soviet machine gun.
All the crew was using brain machine.
They never used American weapons.
It was all Soviet weapons.
And there were Ukrainian and Romanian personnel.
They called it Halkone.
It was recruited by the agency from World War II, whatever.
Put the lights around the boat.
Not a single soul.
We came back again.
We waited again.
Then when we tried to get again, I guess it was in the middle or later part of March.
The boat broke.
The high speed of the boat went down.
So we didn't even go to Guillaume.
We went back.
And then they took the rifle away and said, Hey, your operation has been crashed.
You are going in as head of the infiltration team for Las Villas.
So they added two more men to my team.
There were three of us, there were five of us.
Then we entered in February 28th as the U.S. head of the infiltration team of Las Villas province in Cuba.
Same thing.
We went by land.
Then there was a guide who walked.
We see him about four or five kilometers through farms until we got to the main highway.
And then a car would pick us up two or three at a time and take us to a safe house in Havana.
And then what happened?
They never talk again about killing Castro.
They never what?
Talk again about killing Castro.
Before you guys were shipped over there, did you guys do any practice?
Didn't you guys have to, like, you guys didn't have to practice?
I was a good shooter.
That's amazing.
Right, but I know you were a good shooter, but, like, didn't you guys have to, like, rehearse where he was going to be?
We were supposed to.
Too.
They never did that.
It's amazing.
You never rehearsed.
That's a lack of professionalism on my part.
They didn't know how it should.
Well, maybe they have the record.
Yes, I am a good shooter.
I am an expert shooter with a rifle.
They had the record from the.
But normally, you're going to do something like that, your family are right.
You shoot with the rifle you're going to use.
That's the way it should be done.
They didn't.
Somebody did the shooting.
They allegedly was from Target.
The only thing you have to do is put this round there.
And it's already zeroing.
That's one thing that called my attention.
They should have put me in a range and should.
Was it just going to be you or was there going to be multiple angles?
Like, you know, they talk about the triangular hit teams.
No, no, no.
As far as I know, it's only one person.
Just one shooter?
I didn't.
If there was another person, they didn't turn me.
I don't think there was.
They never took another one because later on they tried to do it from that location with a bazooka.
A bazooka?
Yeah.
And the battery went dead.
They couldn't do it.
They got the bazooka and everything to shoot at Fidel with the bazooka.
And I understand that from the same location, they changed from the rifle to a bazooka and the battery was down.
But when they activated, maybe.
Or maybe the guy was afraid of doing it and they disconnected the battery and said they didn't work.
I don't know.
I just heard that they tried to do that with Bazooka.
It didn't work because the battery was dead.
Have you heard the story about when Kennedy got shot?
Castro, there was a reporter in the room with Castro meeting with him.
And he got a Castro, his aide brought him the phone.
And he picked up the phone.
He listened to it for a minute.
He put the phone down.
And then he looked at the reporter and said, They're going to blame me for this.
No.
Yeah, apparently that's a recount for it.
I think it was in Brazil when the.
That was in that.
There was a documentary on Netflix, Cuba Libre.
You were a part of that.
They interviewed you in there.
I think so.
And it was one of the interviews in Cuba Libre with the guy who said that.
And, you know, the speculation is that Castro, you know, a lot of people like to blame Castro for the Kennedy murder or the Kennedy assassination.
No, Castro was involved.
No question about it.
You think he was?
Oh, yeah.
That's the problem.
Like the Kennedy assassination is so.
Convoluted.
There's so many theories.
No, no, no.
There was, yeah, and we know the shooter too.
Fabian Escalante.
He was a Cuban colonel.
Well, he was a captain at the time.
He was an expert shooter, spoke fluent English.
He was in Dallas that day.
Really?
Fabian Escalante, he left with a private plane to Mexico, then another private plane from there to Cuba.
Really?
Oh, yes.
And the United States knew that.
And the United States covered up for national security consideration.
Because, see, remember, when the October crisis exploded, Cuba already has four nuclear weapons inside the island.
That's why Khrushchev first felt comfortable in bringing 20 of them at a time.
He said, Hey, the Americans know that I bring four missiles inside.
They have done nothing.
They can bring 20.
They're not going to mine.
And that's when he got to a turning point that they could not accept to bring 20 more.
And that's why the Kennedy Khrushchev treaty was never implemented.
Was he, was the guy, what was his name again?
The guy you said?
Fabian Escalante.
Escalante.
Was he a part of the Bay of Pigs at all or Operation 40?
No, no, no.
He was when Castro died.
He was a captain in Castro's army and then he became a general.
Okay.
I heard.
There's a lot of crazy theories.
I heard one theory that part of the guys that were a part of the Operation 40, the anti Castro Cubans, were a part of the.
Assassination team for Kennedy.
It was the three tramps theory.
Believe me, when you look at the history itself, first of all, you're looking at Oswald.
He was one of them.
Oswald went to the Cuban embassy first, Soviet Yemen, and the Cuban embassy in Mexico.
He spent four to five hours inside the Cuban embassy before he went back to Dallas.
The Cubans denied he was ever in the Cuban embassy at the beginning.
When it happened, they said that it was not true, that he was never in the Cuban embassy.
As time went by, and they learned that we had.
Pictures, a movie of him going to the embassy.
They went back to us because they were questioned by the U.S. administration.
I said, Oh, yeah, yeah, it was a mistake.
We went back and we thoroughly went through the record.
Yes, Oswald visited the Cuban embassy.
He was requesting a visa to go to Cuba and we denied the visa.
Can you imagine going to a Cuban embassy and it will take five hours to deny a visa?
To deny the visa, believe me, maybe they will make him wait for one hour.
Right.
Okay?
You don't delay a visa five hours to tell the guy no.
And one thing that is for sure, and he knew that, and we knew that if he doesn't kill, if Kennedy were not killed, Fidel would not be there.
I can guarantee you.
That's why we're tired of the operation with our teammate, that then the president was assassinated.
And I am convinced that the hand, somehow, the guy who killed Bobby Kennedy was also Cuba had to do with it.
Really?
Bobby Kennedy was more obsessed in killing Castro than the president was, both of them.
Especially Bobby Kennedy was a very cool friend of Harry Gurus Williams.
He's one of the bangers.
That's why he got in contact so close with us.
When we were running the operation in Central America, our in between with the CIA was not the CIA personnel.
It was Bobby Kennedy all the time.
And when Bobby Kennedy was, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, our team went with a couple of guys from the MRR to visit Bobby Kennedy to pay the condolence because we were at that time in Central America, an operation that the president had approved.
We had boats, we had commando, we had everything in Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
And what they told me, they recalled the first thing that Bobby told our team and the group was, my brother had.
Two big enemies, the mafia and Fidel Castro.
I believe it was the last one who assassinated him, Fidel Castro.
If Bobby Kenney was involved in planning the assassination of Fidel Castro, when we sent a silencer to Spain to be given to a Cuban mayor to assassinate Fidel, Bobby was well aware of the assassination attempt.
Do you think the US was somehow behind it?
Who?
The United States, the military?
No.
Not a chance.
No chance.
They have tried to blame.
Who is the guy?
I wrote it down.
There was a mob guy.
Santos?
Santos Traficante.
Traficante.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I heard a.
Yeah, he did a lot of Miami.
He was in Miami.
Santos Traficante.
Was he involved at all with any of the.
The hit squads that were being trained, the paramilitary hit squads?
Results?
No.
Because I heard that he was a part because there was the.
That's bullshit.
That's all bullshit?
Yeah.
Okay.
There was another Cuban here, I forgot his name now.
I know he was working with the Cuban intelligence.
And he used to swear he worked for the CIA.
He was with Alpha Sacentice.
He used to claim that he had a meeting with a CIA guy, Oswald, in Dallas before assassination.
And the guy that he claimed from the CIA, when I talked to my friend who was the head of operation, At that time, when Dallas happened, he was assigned in Africa.
He was not even here.
But this guy knew him.
He swear, it happened on television, he swear that he met Oswald with this guy in Dallas.
So I remember when I was, let me see if I can remember his name.
He's a Cuban, well known.
When they did a series, about 20 people, called Leyendas del Exilio, Exile Legends, okay?
I was the first one.
I was the first Ley, and then the people came behind me.
They had him to make a.
I asked him, Is this guy going to be interviewed for Ley in the Lexilio?
He said, Yes.
Don't count me on it.
Get somebody else.
I'm not interested in being legend.
If these guys want to be among this group, forget it.
Do him, don't do it.
They took him out of that.
The son of a bitch, he was working for Cuba.
Whenever you tell him that Cuba participated in the assassination of Kennedy, he will go crazy.
No, Cuba had nothing to do with the assassination of Kennedy.
He defended that tremendously.
What is your thought on the moral question of assassinations versus war?
Because the way it's supposed to go is the first step is when it comes to international conflicts, is the first step is diplomacy.
The second step is war.
And the third step is Title 50 assassinations.
But there's a huge moral question with that.
Assassination vs Diplomacy00:02:18
A lot of people argue like it would save a lot of lives and a lot of money if.
Number three, assassination came before war.
It all depends.
All the circumstances are different.
For example, if people ask me questions about torturing, I don't believe in torture.
But there is a point in time.
Put yourself, you are a professional interrogator.
Okay?
And you are convinced, beyond any doubt, that this guy knows.
Where there is an atomic artifact, Washington, D.C., one big US city.
He knows.
There is no question about that.
You are convinced that he knows that.
What will you do or not do to make sure that that thing doesn't explode?
Okay.
I'll tell you what.
In a situation like that, and you are convinced, To me, you can go to an extreme.
Right.
You can take his eyes out.
You can kill his mother, his brother, his sister, a baby in the head with an innocent guy in front of him.
If he talks, you save five million or four million people.
There is no limit to what you do.
Only, only.
But the thing is, the problem with that is, That maybe people will use this without being really justified.
You can use this and say, well, and really it's not the case.
That's the problem implementing something like that.
Right.
It takes a special kind of person.
You're talking about five million people, my friend.
Right.
You're talking about hundreds of babies like that little one.
Hundreds, if not thousands.
Or little kids, mother, father.
You're talking about saving.
So, would you sacrifice?
Yes.
Moral Limits of Power00:08:56
You have to be true.
You definitely have to be convinced.
Sure, there is no question in your mind, anyway, that the guy knew exactly what that thing is.
And this goes back to the Billy Waugh thing when he was in Khartoum and he had many opportunities to shoot and kill bin Laden.
Instead, he was taking photos and he could not get the authorization to kill bin Laden.
When if he would have killed bin Laden, it would have saved thousands of lives.
But he didn't know that, really.
Right.
It's all hindsight.
Now we know that we have the people in the tower and Pogidia really don't know that exactly.
But if we are really convinced that you got to do it.
Yeah, it all comes down to intelligence.
I forget what the rules are, what the president you know you're doing.
And then you go to prison.
You save millions of people in the worst world.
Yes.
There's a documentary out there.
I'm sure, I know you're familiar with it, but there's a documentary out there about the DEA agent in Latin America or in Mexico.
And there's people that in that documentary, they accuse you of being tied to the murder of the DEA agent.
You're familiar with that?
Kiki Camarena.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, we've been aware of that.
Yeah.
What is your response to those people?
No, no.
Absolutely lie.
First of all, I can prove where I was during that day.
And especially now.
I have, since I knew that thing was happening, I was taking notes of the thing that I do every day.
Okay?
And now more.
In 1993, I started writing everything in detail, what I do every day.
So you tell me that I did something in 1995, September 4, 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
I can tell you exactly where I was, who I met, what I did, what I did, everything.
When Kiki Camarera, when they claimed the day I was supposed to be killing Kiki Camarera, I have a phone call with the White House.
That's when they called me that day to tell me that General Gorman wanted to talk to me, and they gave me a phone number to call General Gorman in Panama.
That day I had a meeting with Perry Rifkin, the director of immigration here in Miami, with Pedro Reboredo, the mayor of the city of West Miami.
Because we had three Nicaraguan Contra fighters who have been very badly wounded.
One called El Tigrito, he had a bullet through his face here.
Because all this thing was hanging down.
He destroyed his mandibula and half of his thumb, everything.
And the other two were paralyzed.
And we were able to get through a friend of mine, the hospital of Recarey in Cuba, which is now, I guess, he owes a lot to IRS.
He's hiding in Spain, I believe.
He was going to allow his hospital to attend these people for free.
Okay.
Now, these people had no documentation to travel, they had no passport.
So I got a lieutenant colonel from the Ute.
From the Honduran intelligence service to issue a document, like an identity document with their picture, height, altitude, weight, and all of this shit in detail.
And then I went with Pedro Aguero to see Pedro Rifkin, the director of immigration, to see if he'll allow to get in that paper, which is not a passport, a humanitarian visa.
So I have the record, Dave's record with the device, me talking to the White House that day, and then talking to all of these people, going to immigration, the record immigration that I was that day.
What country were you in?
What country were you in?
What country were you in that day?
Miami.
Oh, you were in Miami.
We were talking to Pedro Risco, director of immigration here in Miami.
And Pedro Reboredo was the mayor of the city of West Miami.
Oh, okay.
We both went to see the director of immigration here, and he agreed.
He agreed to get the visa.
And we brought the three kids here, finally.
We got the three kids to fly into the United States by Challenger.
I know that.
And then the second day was supposed to be in Mexico, also.
I am at the airport picking up with Reboredo at the door of the plane, the Challenger, the three wounded people to take it to the hospital.
So, I have more than a record.
Now, another thing, they used the name Max Gomez.
In that month, 1985, I didn't know Max Moe 60.
I didn't have that name at all.
Three months later, when I went to fly to El Salvador, my friend Lou Rodriguez, Lieutenant Colonel, when I got there, said, Felix, you have to use another name here, not your true name, when you come to fly as a volunteer here.
I am going to use the name of Maximo Gomez.
Maximo Gomez was a Dominican.
Sergeant in the army in Dominica who became not a generalissimo in the Cuban War of Independence.
It was Dominican.
And he said, Dominican who flew for the freedom of Cuba, you are a Cuban flying for the freedom of El Salvador.
So I want to give you the number of Max Home.
So when I supposedly was in Mexico using Max Home, nobody knew that name.
The name didn't exist at that time.
It came up two or three months later when I went to El Salvador.
Do you think it's possible there was a CIA agent there during the torture at Kiki?
No.
No.
Bullshit.
What the guy is saying is that what they claim this guy, Berrelles, Berrelles is one of the.
I have the copy of the.
Because I called the DA people.
And I contacted the guy from the DA and said, look, let me send you what the DA put out the same day that this guy started telling that they were the one in CIA involving Kirikam Arena.
The name was David Wilson.
David Wilson was.
Not recently.
When they came out with this thing on Amazon and Amazon Prime, they added The Last Narc.
They dedicated the fourth chapter to me.
When that thing happened, this guy, David Wilson, was the director of the retiree for DEA, which is not called DEA retiree.
They're called Association of Federal Former Narcotics Agents.
That's the signal for the retiree from the DEA.
That day, he put a paper, I have a copy of it, to all the DEA retirees, saying they had no idea why these two agents were lying about.
They didn't help.
First of all, that Berryes claimed that he was in charge of Kiki Camarena.
He was never in charge of Kiki Camarena's death investigation at all.
And they didn't know why they were lying because that will hurt the real guy who did it, who was Caro Quintero.
And Caro Quintero did it because he confiscated a huge farm in Mexico that was producing him like a billion dollars in money every year.
And that he got so pissed off at Kiki Camarena that he actually.
Kidnap Kikamarana and then torture him, killing him.
At the beginning, this asshole said that they had a movie of me doing that.
They had a video of you.
Yeah, video and recording.
I said, show it.
They said it was classified, right?
Then they didn't talk anymore about the video.
Then they didn't talk about the recording.
They could not present it because it's not true.
I was not even in Mexico during that time.
And at least the agency, they claimed that the CIA was involved because the CIA had an agreement with these people from the cartel.
To allow the drug to come into the United States and they were receiving money for the Contras.
Right.
And they claimed that the Contras were trained in Una Finca Veracruz, they call it, or Yucatan Finca Veracruz, creo que se llamaba.
That the Contras were trained there.
There is not one single Contra ever trained in Mexico.
Ask them to produce one Contra that said that it was trained in Mexico.
It was a lie.
Not a single Contra, all the Contras were ever trained in Honduras.
How do you think your name got mixed up into all of it?
Just because you were involved with the Contra?
No, no.
Well, first of all, you got carried.
Got me involved in narco trafficking, which isn't true, even though he apologized afterward.
The Cuban government has been saying that for a long time that I'm a torturer and assassin.
Now I appear in the list of the most wanted people from Cuba.
Fortunately, Interpol will not take that at the value.
They have 40 people, they just put it out 10 days ago.
Big leaf accusing all of us of being terrorists.
My name is in it.
There's Ninozka Perez Castellon, the newspaper lady from here, also her name appeared there.
Basulto from Voyage to Iraq, his name appeared there.
All of us are terrorists for them.
Cuba have accused me of everything except one thing.
They have never accused me of being a queer.
Other than that, every single thing in the book, they are throwing at me, except that.
Accusations of Terrorism00:00:36
Well, you're doing good on that front, I guess.
Yeah.
Felix, thank you so much for doing this.
It's an honor to talk to you.
Your life has been a movie, to say the least.
Is there anything else we can say?
Do you have like a website or do you have a book?
People can find that you've written, or is there anything people can do to contact you if they want to talk to you?
Or, yeah, they very well talk to me, talk to you when you tell me.
Well, Felix, thanks again.
I'm really grateful for your time today, and uh, that's all, folks.