May 6, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
48:47
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the last photograph of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara alive. | ||
| It was taken in Bolivia in 1967. It's a very famous photograph, probably familiar to most people watching this. | ||
| This man, standing right there, is not familiar to most people watching this. | ||
| He should be. | ||
| He's about to be. | ||
| His name is Felix Rodriguez. | ||
| He's a longtime CIA officer in the Operations Directorate, and he joins us now to explain this picture and to tell us about his life. | ||
| Mr. Rodriguez, thank you very much. | ||
| Pleasure to be here. | ||
| So, it's a remarkable picture. | ||
| The longer I look at it, the more I think that. | ||
| Can you tell us where this was and what was happening? | ||
| Well, that was in La Higuera, Bolivia. | ||
| That's where he was captured. | ||
| And I came in on the helicopter with the colonel in charge of the operation. | ||
| And after a while, I got to talk to him. | ||
| And I even thought about taking the picture, but while I was talking to him, the pilot of the helicopter came with a camera from the head of intelligence who wanted a picture with Shea. | ||
| So I asked him, Commander, do you mind? | ||
| He said, no. | ||
| So we took him out of the schoolhouse and gave my camera to the pilot, and he took that picture. | ||
| So you talked to Guevara? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| What were the circumstances? | ||
| He'd been captured by Bolivian soldiers? | ||
| Is that right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yes, actually, they thought that he had been killing Africa. | ||
| But then, when they captured Debray and Busto, who was a French intellectual, and then a newspaper guy from Argentina, they confirmed that Che Guevara was there. | ||
| So as long as they understood that he was there, they sent a special forces unit from Panama to train a special battalion to operate against him, because the Bolivians didn't have any experience. | ||
| And then they sent a couple of us from the CIA to provide them with intelligence. | ||
| And the reason they sent us is because we were not U.S. citizens. | ||
| At the time, Vietnam was taking place, and there were people coming back in plastic bag from Vietnam, and they didn't want any Americans coming back in plastic bag from Latin America. | ||
| At the time, we were not even residents. | ||
| We were not citizens, so we didn't fall into the restriction of Ambassador Henderson. | ||
| That's why we were able to go there. | ||
| So you were working for the CIA full-time, obviously, carrying a weapon, obviously, but not a U.S. citizen. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What was Che like that day? | ||
| Why first? | ||
| A lot of people ask me, you know, what I thought about Che. | ||
| Che at the time was nobody. | ||
| Che became a figure after he was dead. | ||
| Cuba made him a figure. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| After war, even though they were the one who sent him to be killed. | ||
| Fidel could not stand him there because Fidel depended on the Soviet Union and Che Guevara was pro-Chinese. | ||
| So when he was in Africa in 1965-64, all the weapons he received was from Red China. | ||
| And then he didn't want to go back to Cuba. | ||
| He went to hire in the Czech Republic. | ||
| And they had to send people to convince him to go back to Cuba and to give him an opportunity in another place. | ||
| But when he was sent to Bolivia, it was definitely in mind for him to be killed. | ||
| Because the Soviets didn't want him to be any successful because they knew that Che was pro-Chinese. | ||
| And if he took a revolution in there, it would be toward the Chinese. | ||
| And at the time, the Chinese and the Soviets hated each other very much. | ||
| So when he was sent to Bolivia, his transmitter was not even working. | ||
| In December of 1966, when they had a dinner with Mario Monge, the head of the Communist Party of Bolivia, who had been with Fidel two months before, completed a complete progress. | ||
| He told the Bolivian guerrillas that were with Shea, if they stayed with Shea, they were expelled from the Communist Party. | ||
| And then they had an officer in intelligence that they had sent to La Paz, Renan Montedo, to help him. | ||
| And as soon as he was in with all 17 people, they took him out of the picture and told Che that they had to take him out because his visa had expired. | ||
| And actually, he was a Bolivian citizen by then. | ||
| So he was definitely sent there to be killed by Cuba because he could not succeed because it would be a revolution that would be pro-Chinese and Cuba dependent on the Soviet Union. | ||
| So obviously he's a prisoner in this picture. | ||
| Does he know when this was taken that he's about to die? | ||
| Not at that time. | ||
| No. | ||
| So what happened in the moments after this picture? | ||
| Well, in the sequence, first of all, when we arrived with the helicopter on the following day, which is the 9th of October and Monday, we came to the room with the officers and he would not talk to anybody. | ||
| The coroner was trying to interrogate him. | ||
| He looked at him. | ||
| He didn't say any word. | ||
| To the point, the guy said, look, you invaded my country. | ||
| At least you can have the courtesy of answering me. | ||
| He didn't say a word. | ||
| So when we finished that, I came out. | ||
| I asked for all his documentation to photograph it from my government. | ||
| And the coroner ordered his bag to be given to me. | ||
| He had some Chinese code books. | ||
| He had some pictures of his family, some medicament for his asthma inside. | ||
| And he had a diary. | ||
| It's a German book. | ||
| It was written in Spanish. | ||
| That's his diary. | ||
| So I photographed all of that. | ||
| Then while I was there, there came a news, the telephone call, Aldigeras. | ||
| I was the highest-ranking officer. | ||
| So there were definitely the orders to execute him. | ||
| We had a very simple code, 500, 600, kill him, 700, keep him alive. | ||
| So it came 500, 600. But Colonel Centeno came out, I told him, I said, look, this order from your high Bolivian command to eliminate the prisoner. | ||
| The order from my government tried to keep him alive at all costs, so we have helicopters to take him to Panama for interrogation. | ||
| So he looked at me and said, Felix, my name was Felix Ramos. | ||
| He said, you have been very helpful to us, but this is an order from my president. | ||
| He looked at his watch and he said, the helicopter is going to come several times, bringing food and ammunition, taking our wounded and our dead, but after 2 o'clock he's going to come up and pick up Che Guevara's dead body. | ||
| You cannot justiciate him any way you want because we know how much harm he has done to your country. | ||
| So I said to me, Colonel, try to make that change in their mind. | ||
| But if it does not change in mine, I will view my word of honor. | ||
| I will bring you dead body of shit. | ||
| So we embraced and he left. | ||
| And sure enough, the helicopter came several times. | ||
| That's when the mayor came and asked for a picture with the prisoner. | ||
| Then I started waiting and see what happened. | ||
| And then there was a schoolteacher who came to me and said, why are you going to kill him? | ||
| I said, why did you say that? | ||
| I said, look, we saw that you took a picture of him outside, and look, the radio's already giving the news. | ||
| So at that point, I knew there was nothing else to be done. | ||
| So I got into the room, I stood in front and said, Commander, I'm sorry. | ||
| I tried my best. | ||
| He turned white like a piece of paper, and he said, it's better this way. | ||
| I should have never been captured alive. | ||
| So you told Che Guevara he was about to be killed? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| In a way, the way I said, I'm sorry, I tried my best. | ||
| I understood what I was saying. | ||
| Then he took his pipe out and said, I'd like to give this pipe to a soldadito who treated me well. | ||
| And at that time, Sergeant Tehran, who he knew was the one executing the live prisoner, burst into the room. | ||
| Yo quiero la pipa, mi capitán, I want the pipe. | ||
| And Chia said, no, I won't give it to you. | ||
| A ti no te la doy. | ||
| So I ordered him three times to leave the room. | ||
| When he did, I looked at Chia and said, would you give it to me? | ||
| He said, I will give it to you. | ||
| So I put my pipe here. | ||
| I said, is there anything you want for your family? | ||
| Then I would say in a sarcastic way, he said, well, if you can't tell Fidel, he will soon see a triumphal revolution in America. | ||
| Then he changed the expression and said, if you can't tell my wife to remarry and try to be happy. | ||
| That was his last word. | ||
| He approached me. | ||
| We shook hands. | ||
| We embraced. | ||
| It was a very strange and unique moment in my life because we never ordered prisoners to be executed. | ||
| At the time, I even thought about cutting the telephone line and telling the pilot that my government was able to convince them to bring Che alive. | ||
| And I remember what happened when Batista released Fidel Castro and what happened to my country. | ||
| So I told myself, look, this is not your word. | ||
| You're here to advise, not to command. | ||
| This is the Bolivian decision. | ||
| So let history run itself. | ||
| So I let it go the way it was. | ||
| And that was the end of it. | ||
| What happened to Che at that point? | ||
| Well, after we embraced, which was, like I say, a very strange moment for me, because he was my enemy at the same time. | ||
| I feel sorry for him, and he conducted himself with dignity at the end. | ||
| I left the room, and there was Sergeant Teran. | ||
| I told him, no, shoot from here down, shoot from here down, because this man's supposed to die from combat. | ||
| See me, Capitan, see me, Capitan, and he left. | ||
| So it was one o'clock in the afternoon, Bolivian time. | ||
| When I left there, about 1.15, I heard the burst. | ||
| And that's the time that we were killed, executed. | ||
| They just shot him in the room. | ||
| He was shot by an M2 carabine that was borrowed by this sergeant from Lieutenant Perez, who had an automatic carabine. | ||
| I understand because I wasn't present. | ||
| He came in and said, Che Guevara, I'd like to talk to you. | ||
| And he told him, he said, look, I know you're coming to kill me. | ||
| He said, no, no, we're not going to kill you. | ||
| You're worse than our lives than that. | ||
| And then he told him, I want you to know you're going to kill a man. | ||
| So he opened fire. | ||
| He said, it went like this, so it's a bullet that hit here, which is normal. | ||
| Reaction to try to cover yourself. | ||
| So he was shot and killed. | ||
| I came back a few hours later with two of the captains from the operation, Captain Gary Prado and Celso Torrelli, and we got into the room. | ||
| His head was facing the ceiling. | ||
| It was covered with mud. | ||
| So there was a dead body of two Cubans behind him that had been killed in operation. | ||
| One was Captain Pantoja, another captain from the Cuban army who died in combat. | ||
| So we embraced him there, and Kariplau said, Mi Capitan, we have finished the guerrillas in Latin America. | ||
| I told him, Mi Capitan, we haven't finished it. | ||
| At least we have delayed them for a long time. | ||
| So we could hear the helicopter coming, and they immediately left. | ||
| So I asked for a bucket of water. | ||
| I cleaned his face. | ||
| I took all the mud out of his face. | ||
| I tried to close his jaw with my handkerchief, which I lost in the helicopter with the wind. | ||
| And then I tried to close his eyes and it was impossible. | ||
| They had been open too long. | ||
| So I tried to close and he popped up again several times. | ||
| So I gave up on it. | ||
| So we took the body and we tied it to the right side of the helicopter. | ||
| And while we're finishing to do that, I remember... | ||
| You tied it to the struts of the helicopter? | ||
| To the right pontoon of the helicopter, the right side. | ||
| And I remember the pilot, my name was Guzmán, told me, my captain, moved forward to balance the helicopter. | ||
| So I put my hand under him and pulled it out. | ||
| When he brought it out, it was completely covered with blood. | ||
| Apparently, it was shot in the aorta. | ||
| And since these plastic things didn't allow any water to go through, there was a big pool of blood in there. | ||
| I look at it. | ||
| I didn't say anything, but I thought to myself, there are people who have blood in their hands. | ||
| I have the hell of a lot of here. | ||
| So I cleaned the blood in the right side of my pants. | ||
| I came in, and then a soldier came and said, Mayor, Mayor, Father Schillers went to see him. | ||
| So we stood with the helicopter running for maybe a couple of minutes, and there was a priest who came on a mule. | ||
| He came around. | ||
| He got down on the mule, and he gave him the last benediction, which I took a picture of. | ||
| Minox camera that I have left. | ||
| I thought to myself, this guy was an atheist. | ||
| He didn't believe in God. | ||
| Never delay, he received the rapture from the Catholic Church. | ||
| And from there we took off and then we landed in Valle Grande. | ||
| There were thousands of people waiting at the runway. | ||
| There was like 15 different planes from the press, from the military, waiting for him to arrive. | ||
| So I put my cap and run into the people. | ||
| So my picture was never taken. | ||
| And then he was taken into a schoolhouse, excuse me, into a hospital, Nuestro Señor de Malta. | ||
| Then in the evening there was a meeting and the general was telling a coronel, if Fidel denies this is Che Guevara, we need tangible proof of it. | ||
| Cut his head and put it in formaldehyde. | ||
| So I said, I mean, general, you cannot do that. | ||
| They said, why not? | ||
| I said, supposedly Fidel denies this is Che Guevara. | ||
| You are a head of a state. | ||
| You cannot show the head of a human being a proof. | ||
| He said, well, what do you suggest? | ||
| I said, well, if you want some tangible proof of it, cut one finger, and we have the fingerprint from the Argentinian federal police, and it can be checked. | ||
| So he ordered both hands to be cut. | ||
| So I left with all the documentation for Santa Cruz, and my other friend stayed in there, and then about 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning when the press was gone, They took his body, they cut both hands and put in formalahide and two other bodies and they took it to the very end of the runway and they buried him in there with two bodies. | ||
| There was a bulldozer there who was making longer the runway and he was buried right there. | ||
| Now, later on, years later, when Fidel said he found the body on the side of the runway with seven other bodies, I can assure you that was not Che Guevara because he wasn't buried there. | ||
| Amazing! | ||
| And so what did you do? | ||
| It was 1967. Let's back up really quickly. | ||
| You were born in Cuba. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When did you come to the United States? | ||
| Well, I came in 1954 for school. | ||
| I came to Perky Home and Prep in Pensburg, Pennsylvania. | ||
| I spent six years in there, 7th and 8th grade and my high school. | ||
| And I actually went off my last year to go to the first scene that was against Castro, was the Anti-Communist Legion of the Caribbean in the Dominican Republic. | ||
| So I participated in that operation when I was 17, 18 years old, and I came back. | ||
| And then after graduation, I was accepted at the University of Miami for civil engineering. | ||
| But before I went there, I learned there was something going on in Latin America. | ||
| Against Castro, I joined what later became the Bay of Pig invasion. | ||
| I was 19 years old at the time. | ||
| What was your role in the Bay of Pigs invasion? | ||
| I was part of what they call the Special Forces or infiltration thing. | ||
| So I was a group of about 36 people. | ||
| We got into Cuba. | ||
| A month and a half before the invasion to work with the resistance. | ||
| I came in clandestinely by boat. | ||
| I started working inside the island, helping them with all kinds of equipment and trying to do an uprising in another area. | ||
| Then, actually, the Bay of Pigs surprised us because they never told us anything. | ||
| If they had been able to tell us that the invasion was coming, we had enough explosives to be able maybe to blow some bridges toward the Bay of Peaks and delay the advancement of Castro's troops. | ||
| But they never told anything. | ||
| We learned through the Cuban radio. | ||
| So at that time, I was lucky. | ||
| I was able to make it through the Venezuelan embassy, where I spent five and a half months. | ||
| In Havana? | ||
| In Havana. | ||
| And then finally got safe conduct, went back to Venezuela at the end of September. | ||
| How did you get from the Bay of Pigs to Havana? | ||
| That's a long way, isn't it? | ||
| No, I wasn't in the Bay of Pigs. | ||
| I landed near Havana a month and a half before the Bay of Pigs and worked with the resistance. | ||
| We had a mechanism of the internal resistance to pick us up near the highway and then take off to safe houses in Havana. | ||
| Then we started working with them in there during that time. | ||
| So I wasn't at the Bay of Pigs at the time. | ||
| And I was lucky because I didn't have any idea of any embassy there, but the lady who was driving me around was close connected to the Spanish embassy. | ||
| And the Spaniard Alejandro Vergara, who was in charge of the cold propaganda, actually was intelligence, came to pick her up because they were surrounding our building. | ||
| Fidel very successfully, he surrounded every single block in Havana. | ||
| And if you were a male or military Asian, you were not assigned to a military unit, even though you might have been even a communist, they would take you and put in custody. | ||
| There were a baseball field with 250,000 Cubans in there. | ||
| The theater, the capacity for 5,000 people, 5,500. | ||
| So they were able to disarticulate internal resistance that way. | ||
| Even they picked up some of my friends that went in and then they released them because they had no idea who they were. | ||
| But I was lucky to make it to the Venezuelan Embassy and then back into Miami. | ||
| I actually got to Miami on the very first of October of 1961. | ||
| And then by the end of October, I was back inside Cuba. | ||
| Went back seven times because I was the only one who left the contact open after the failure of the Bay of Peaks to bring people and equipment in and for intelligence purpose. | ||
| What kind of equipment were you bringing in? | ||
| Oh, we were bringing explosives. | ||
| We were bringing in M3 machine guns, all kinds of hand grenades and all those things that they were still bringing in to be able to support a future resistance. | ||
| But then it didn't work out. | ||
| Then I decided, actually in 1962, I decided to marry my present wife of 62 years. | ||
| I told her, I said, look Rosa, I'm going to quit, I'm going to go into civilian life, but I want you to know if there is something serious about Cuba, I will go. | ||
| So she made the mistake of agreeing to that, because we got married on the 25th of August. | ||
| I started working at a company for $1 an hour called Isolator Service Propaganda. | ||
| Then I was improving Tobin Packaging Company $1.35 an hour. | ||
| So while I was working there, and remember I got married 25th of August. | ||
| In the month of October, I got a call from a CIA guy and said, look, I need to talk to you after you work at that company. | ||
| So I went to see him at the parking lot of the Howard and Johnson across from the University of Miami. | ||
| I sit in his car and I say, 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? | ||
| Good point. | ||
| He said, well, you know how to operate a radio beacon. | ||
| We let you to parachute behind a Soviet missile base in Santa Clara. | ||
| To set up a radio beacon so that our Air Force can hit with precision the airbase. | ||
| At the time, we didn't have the GPS system that we have today. | ||
| So at that time, I agreed. | ||
| So they took me to a safe house and my basic training was romping from different altitudes. | ||
| The three points of contact where I didn't break a leg. | ||
| I couldn't even call my wife. | ||
| My wife went back to the apartment. | ||
| And of course, that night was when Kennedy went on national television and declared the October crisis. | ||
| So she realized it was something related to that. | ||
| So the day we were going to parachute into Cuba, the day that Khrushchev backed down on the operation. | ||
| And then, you know, after that, we had a job, so then I continued to work with the CIA. For how long? | ||
| Oh, until 1976 when they retired me for security consideration after Colonel Centeno Naya, who was his advisor, was assassinated in Paris. | ||
| He was the Bolivian ambassador there, and he was killed, and they left a sign saying Che Guevara commando. | ||
| Then they also assassinated Mayor Quintanilla, who was the colonel then, Roberto Quintanilla in Hamburg, Germany, who was the consul general from Bolivia there, also left a sign saying, uh, Comando Che Guevara. | ||
| And they called my home and say, Felix Ramos, you're next. | ||
| That's the name that I used in Bolivia that never came out. | ||
| So the agency proposed me one of those programs to change my name and go to another state, which I would not accept because of my kids. | ||
| So what they did, they went to my home. | ||
| They did a security evaluation. | ||
| They actually gave me a bulletproof car. | ||
| They bulletproofed my car in Langley, Virginia. | ||
| I got a license to carry a concealed weapon that was difficult to get at the time. | ||
| And they gave me a total disability. | ||
| I didn't have to work, have a routine of work. | ||
| Put some iron fences in my house, some security, and then I sign a paper for them. | ||
| If I got killed related to my job, my family could not show, you know, they could not sue them in any way or form because what they offer me that they consider I refuse to. | ||
| But then after that, I continue independently to do some things like I went into El Salvador, flying with Salvadorian Guerrilla as a volunteer with a concept that I developed in Vietnam, where I spent two and a half years in Vietnam after Bolivia. | ||
| And it was very effective in El Salvador when I was there. | ||
| What were you doing in Vietnam as a CIA officer? | ||
| Well, my responsibility was to stop the rocketing of Saigon and the rocketing of the boat coming into Saigon. | ||
| We were advising a unit called the PRU, Provincial Reconnaissance Unit. | ||
| It's a CIA unit who was managed, paid, and controlled by the CIA. And it was almost impossible to stop the rocketing of Saigon. | ||
| And it did it for psychological reasons. | ||
| Every week... | ||
| There will be one or two 122-point Soviet missiles going into the city at random. | ||
| Normally, they try to hit the presidential palace and the U.S. Embassy, which they never did, but it was a psychological thing. | ||
| And we started looking in an area. | ||
| It was impossible to locate these people until I was able to capture one who was the bodyguard of Tutank, the commander of that unit. | ||
| And he told me that they were hiding in an area that we never thought of because the tide of the water would come up like 17 feet. | ||
| And what they did, he told me, they had 55-gallon drums, they soldered one on top of the other, so they were sleeping there when the water went up. | ||
| When the water went down, they run across the river, they fired the rocket into the area, and then they came back and hide again. | ||
| Then I started looking at that area, which we never did before. | ||
| And actually, on the 4th of December of 1970, I was able to establish contact with the commander of the unit. | ||
| We killed 18 of them. | ||
| We lost three of our PRU. And from there on, we continued the pressure. | ||
| And there was not a single rocket firing to Saigon after that. | ||
| And for that, I got equal to the Congressional Medal of Honor from the Vietnamese Armed Forces called the Cross of Gallantry with Gold Star. | ||
| I got one of that, two silver stars and six bronze stars during the time that I was with them. | ||
| And then I got the intelligence star for Valor from the CIA because of the operation in Vietnam. | ||
| I'm sure you've been asked this a thousand times, but since you worked there, you worked for President Kennedy, Yes. | ||
| And he was, of course, killed in November of 1963, and countless books have been written blaming Cuban exiles, people who participated in the Bay of Pigs, for being... | ||
| Involved in some way with the CIA in that assassination. | ||
| What's your assessment of that claim? | ||
| Well, I'll tell you. | ||
| Most of the brigade member believes President Kennedy was a traitor. | ||
| He was the one who definitely had the responsibility and he was responsible for failure. | ||
| Looking from another point, I believe that he was a young president, ill-advised, and we paid the price. | ||
| And I believe that actually he was killed because he tried to amend that. | ||
| After he was able to pull the brigade out of prison, he opened the Armed Forces of the United States for the brigade members. | ||
| He became a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in 1963. And then he promised us a special operation, which was started in Central America in three different bases and not many people know about it. | ||
| But then he was assassinated. | ||
| And a lot of people believed that there was only one shooter. | ||
| I believe there were two shooters. | ||
| We have information that there was a Cuban, which is now a retired general, Fabian Escalante, who was a captain at the time, who was in Dallas. | ||
| And he was the second shooter in the assassination of the president. | ||
| Well, you just... | ||
| Okay, I'm sorry, will you say that one more time? | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| Fabian Escalante. | ||
| Escalante. | ||
| Fabian Escalante. | ||
| And he was in Dallas that day, and then he left. | ||
| It was something that... | ||
| And Castro said that he knew that... | ||
| The United States was trying to kill him to be very careful because the Cuban also had a very long hand. | ||
| So it was a matter either Kennedy or Castro. | ||
| I think that's how he got killed. | ||
| So you believe that Kennedy was assassinated by Cuban forces, Castro? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Remember that Oswald was in the Cuban embassy for several hours before he went to Dallas that day. | ||
| And we also have the fact, with no question about it, that Fabian Escalante was there. | ||
| And then Cuba denied at the beginning that he was ever in the Cuban Embassy. | ||
| Later on, when they learned that we, as CIA, we had pictures and movies of him getting into our embassy. | ||
| Then they said that they went into a very distinct check and they found out that indeed, yes, Oswald was in the Cuban Embassy and they claimed that he came in there to get a Cuban visa and he was denied. | ||
| But I do believe that it was the participation of Cuba in the assassination of the president. | ||
| And later on, one assistant of President Johnson said that they knew about it, but for security consideration, they denied to the public the participation of Cuba in the assassination of the president. | ||
| Because remember, at that time, there were already four offensive missiles inside Cuba. | ||
| When the October crisis took place, they already had been able to bring into Cuba four offensive nuclear missiles. | ||
| That's why when Khrushchev thought, and he knew that the US knew that they had four offensive missiles inside the island, it could bring 20 of them. | ||
| That's when the October crisis took place. | ||
| But there were still four missiles inside Cuba that were offensive. | ||
| So at the time, everybody said, well, they cannot attack Cuba because the Kennedy-Khrushchev treaty, it was never implemented. | ||
| Because the important part of that trade was that it would be a personal ocular inspection by American personnel in Cuba to make sure that they had taken out those four missiles. | ||
| And Cuba never allowed them to be able to come in to check for that. | ||
| So that compromise was never, the Kennedy Khrushchev was never implemented at all. | ||
| Do you believe the CIA had any role in Kennedy's assassination? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| I don't believe so. | ||
| I know there's a lot of allegations to that effect, but I don't think so. | ||
| I don't believe so at all. | ||
| Did you ever come across Howard Hunt? | ||
| Yes, I met him after he came out of prison. | ||
| Actually, he was coming for Christmas out of prison. | ||
| And I met his daughter with our team at home, Kevin. | ||
| And we ran to each other into Sears, so I invited him to come to my home. | ||
| You ran into him in Sears? | ||
| Yeah, in Miami. | ||
| And I invited him to come to my home. | ||
| While I'm sitting there, I get a call from the chief of station from Miami and say, Felix, by the way, our home will be in town. | ||
| Make sure that you don't meet him. | ||
| And the guy was sitting right in front of me. | ||
| I already had given him my car to use for the three days he was in Miami. | ||
| So later on, I called my boss. | ||
| I said, you should have called me sooner. | ||
| I said, what? | ||
| He said, well, I had our home in front of my house. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| I said, yes. | ||
| You didn't tell me. | ||
| And I drove him to Sierra. | ||
| I brought him to my home. | ||
| It's the first time I ever met him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amazing. | |
| Why did the CIA not want you to see Howard Hunt? | ||
| Because they don't want to see, they believe there is a connection between the CIA and then, even though Howard Hunt was working for the CIA, but he was head of the task force for the White House with Nixon. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So there was a connection there. | ||
| Yes, there was. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| How did you get involved in the Iran-Contra story? | ||
| Well, when I was in Miami, I thought the war was going on in El Salvador. | ||
| I had implemented a helicopter set in Vietnam that was extremely effective against the Viet Cong in there. | ||
| With intelligence, going to the area with gunships and then spotting them. | ||
| I was flying on the low helicopter, spotting them, then coming back with troops and getting the result. | ||
| So I volunteered to go to El Salvador in 85, early 85. That's why I went to El Salvador then as a volunteer. | ||
| Nobody was paying me anything. | ||
| Who did you volunteer to? | ||
| With the Salvadorian Air Force. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But it wasn't easy. | ||
| It was very difficult because you have the U.S. military commander, General Gorman, four-star general, who command all the military assistance to the area. | ||
| And here is a Cuban retired from the CIA trying to implement a military concept in his area. | ||
| But I was lucky that the Vice President of the United States had Don Greg, who was my boss from Vietnam, as his national security advisor. | ||
| And he knew how effective my concept was, so he helped me to be able to get the clearance from the State Department and other people for me to go down there. | ||
| So I started working with the concept down in El Salvador, who was extremely successful. | ||
| At one point in time, Oliver North had a problem with a plane that was stuck in Portugal that he could not bring in because Honduran closed the entrance of his plane there because of an incident they had with the plane with the resistance. | ||
| And he knew that I had an excellent relationship with the Salvadorians, so he sent notes to me that if I could get the Salvadorian to hold all of this military equipment from Portugal until he was able to solve the problem with Honduras. | ||
| So I talked to the head of the Air Force, he sent me to the Minister of Defense, and they agreed. | ||
| That's how I got involved in the Iran-Contra thing. | ||
| They brought the plane, it was storage in there for a while. | ||
| And when they saw that, they asked me if I could ask the Salvadorians if they could do the maintenance of the aircraft from the Nicaraguan Resistance Operation in El Salvador. | ||
| And that's how we got started in that operation in there. | ||
| But really, the Vice President had very little to do in this operation. | ||
| Of course, when the Iran contract broke, they blamed. | ||
| Actually, they came out to say that I was sent to El Salvador to violate the Bolan Amendment to support the Nicaraguan resistance, and my helicopter concept was a cover-up, which wasn't true. | ||
| That wasn't the case at all. | ||
| And then they subpoenaed me to testify in front of Congress. | ||
| I was the only one who went to Congress without a lawyer and without immunity. | ||
| Everybody else went with a lawyer and immunity. | ||
| And they tried. | ||
| Even the White House called me and said, Boyden Gray from the White House. | ||
| They wanted me to bring a lawyer that the White House was going to pay for. | ||
| I said, look, I have done nothing wrong. | ||
| If I have to bring a lawyer for what I did, I am in the wrong country. | ||
| I don't believe I am in the wrong country. | ||
| So they told me, no, you don't understand. | ||
| You know how these congressmen are. | ||
| They might have asked you to push you into saying something that might hurt the vice president. | ||
| And I refused. | ||
| So I was the only one who went without a lawyer and without immunity. | ||
| And he came out fine. | ||
| And the only guy that I really don't like at all, because after that he asked me to testify in his committee, was John Kerry. | ||
| Why didn't you like John Kerry? | ||
| He's funny. | ||
| He was no war hero. | ||
| To be honest with you, I was invited when he run for president, the Vietnam Veteran for the Truth, to make a big rally on the West Wing of the Capitol. | ||
| And at that time, they asked me to be one of the speakers against him because of what he did to me. | ||
| You know, he accused me of receiving $10 million from the Medellin cartel for the contract, which wasn't true. | ||
| You know, it was a pain. | ||
| It was very hard for my family because I was flying in El Salvador and my wife called me and said, look, it's front page in the Miami Herald. | ||
| You picture when you were in the army. | ||
| That you received $10 million from the Medellin cartel. | ||
| I said, you know, that's not true. | ||
| She said, I know, but here is a subpoena from Senator Kerry's committee. | ||
| So I called from El Salvador, Senator Kerry, and I asked him, I said, look, you don't need a subpoena with me, but send a ticket in Easter because they're not doing mileage, which they did. | ||
| So I flew to Washington. | ||
| We spent four hours in a deposition with him. | ||
| He was represented by a man that was a... | ||
| Mitch McConnell was the minority, so there was Robinette representing Mitch McConnell and another guy who represented him. | ||
| After we finished the testimony, they wanted a closed hearing. | ||
| We wanted an open hearing. | ||
| There was nothing classified about it. | ||
| I had retired in 76. We are talking something that happened in 1985. But Kerry didn't want the truth to come out, so he refused to have an open hearing. | ||
| We had to go into a closed hearing. | ||
| When I had the opportunity at the time, when I first came in, they asked me if I wanted to say something. | ||
| There was all the senators. | ||
| And they ask me, I say, you want to say something? | ||
| I say, yes. | ||
| I look at him and say, Senator, this will be the hardest testimony of my life. | ||
| I say, why do you say that, Mr. Rodriguez? | ||
| I say, Senator, it's very hard to have to ask a question for somebody that you do not respect. | ||
| I don't respect you or what you are doing here. | ||
| I said, Mr. Rodriguez, because we disagree with you. | ||
| We are no less patriotic than you are. | ||
| A senator, you didn't even have the guts to throw your own medal when you were protesting the Vietnam War. | ||
| Don't believe everything you see in the press. | ||
| I know that the hell of a lot of better than you do, Senator. | ||
| He said, that was a veteran who asked me to throw his medal. | ||
| I said, bullshit. | ||
| It was everybody's perception was your medal. | ||
| You were throwing over the White House fans. | ||
| So we really didn't hit very well during that hearing. | ||
| At all. | ||
| And then I talked to a lot of people who were with him. | ||
| Do you know that he was never, ever wounded in combat? | ||
| He doesn't have one bullet hole in his body, and he claimed three Purple Hearts to be able to leave Vietnam. | ||
| He knew that there was an unwritten law that if you get wounded three times in one tour, you could request to leave Vietnam. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's exactly what he did. | ||
| What he did, he scratched himself. | ||
| He claimed it was from a hand grenade. | ||
| He never got a bullet hole. | ||
| He got scratches. | ||
| He always claimed that he had been wounded at that time. | ||
| Get a Purple Heart. | ||
| The third one, it was denied. | ||
| The guy didn't say it was worth it. | ||
| He had to wait until they changed that guy to be able to convince the other guy to give him his third Purple Heart. | ||
| And that's why he left Vietnam. | ||
| And then he went with Jane Fonda, talking about our people in there. | ||
| It was a shame. | ||
| Because today I see how our people treat the military with respect in the planes. | ||
| At the time when I came back, they would not even wear their uniform. | ||
| Because they were called war criminals and all of that because of John Kerry and Jane Fonda. | ||
| Cowards. | ||
| So, what was the resolution of Iran country? | ||
| You testified. | ||
| Well, at the end, really, actually, when you look at it, they didn't have a case at all. | ||
| Because the only reason they brought the Iran contract hearing was because the violation of the Bolan Amendment of using U.S. money to support the Nicaraguan resistance. | ||
| So what happened is when General Secor did some transaction with Iran, remember, with Israel, he got the millions of dollars from that transaction. | ||
| The Congress determined that that money that he had belonged to the U.S. government, not to Secor. | ||
| It's still in court today. | ||
| It's still in court today. | ||
| It's over eight million dollars. | ||
| And he used a million and a half to help the Nicaraguan resistance with that money. | ||
| So because of that, since the Congress determined that that was money that belonged to the U.S. government, they violated the Bolan Amendment. | ||
| That's how he came together and put up the grand contract hearings and committees and all of that that he went through. | ||
| Let me tell you, it wasn't easy because after so many questions, I was tired. | ||
| Before that, my son and my daughter went to see, I had an FBI agent that always had been in contact with them for my security. | ||
| I learned recently, he already died from his widow, that my son and my daughter went to see him before I testified in Congress. | ||
| And they told him, look, Carlos, everybody's telling us if my father doesn't bring a lawyer, he will go to prison. | ||
| Please convince him to bring a lawyer with him. | ||
| So he didn't tell me that he came to see me and say, look, Felix. | ||
| You're going to testify in Congress, and you're going to be on the roads. | ||
| You cannot lie. | ||
| No matter what happens, you cannot lie. | ||
| Because if you do, they will ask the same question in 15 different ways, and they will know. | ||
| Now, in some sense, you are not very happy with it, or you are not very content with it, you don't remember. | ||
| If you don't remember, they cannot do anything. | ||
| But don't lie. | ||
| And I never lied. | ||
| So I came out fine. | ||
| Have you ever wondered how you lived so long, having been through all these conflicts? | ||
| I believe, honestly, I believe in God. | ||
| For example, when I was in Vietnam, my boss, Ted Shockley, who was a legend with the CIA, used to tell people that I had a death wish, that I wanted to get killed, which was not at all. | ||
| I was so convinced, Tucker, that no bullet was going to hit me. | ||
| God gave me that conviction. | ||
| So I could sit in the helicopter, see they are shooting, and they come out and shoot at them, because I knew it wasn't going to touch me, and I never did. | ||
| So it wasn't no bravery. | ||
| It was my conviction that I knew it wasn't going to hit me. | ||
| And you were a married man at that point? | ||
| Yes, I had two kids already. | ||
| And you were never worried about getting killed? | ||
| I knew I wasn't going to get killed. | ||
| Not even wounded. | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| I had people wounded next to me. | ||
| My helicopter took 30 different occasions to fire, took hits in the helicopter body, but I was shot down five times. | ||
| Vietnam, one in El Salvador. | ||
| You were shot down five times? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But, you know. | ||
| My back is in bad shape, but probably still alive. | ||
| And I believe it was God who definitely was his hand on me. | ||
| That's why I didn't worry about it. | ||
| Not that I was brave. | ||
| I was convinced nothing was going to happen to me. | ||
| But you were right, it turned out. | ||
| Oh, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| What was Ted Shackley like? | ||
| Oh, he was the most intelligent man that I have ever met in my life. | ||
| He was the one responsible for the Berlin Tunnel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was chief of a station in Miami, and we became close friends. | ||
| Until the day he died. | ||
| And we were close. | ||
| We used to meet. | ||
| He was the head of a station in Saigon. | ||
| And we developed a personal friendship. | ||
| He's the one who one time told me not to fly. | ||
| They had a defector in Paris who said that they were... | ||
| We're going to hijack the plane of the Cuban involved in the assassination of Che Guevara. | ||
| So Chuck Lee called me on the station and said, if you're going to Miami on vacation, don't fly into Miami. | ||
| So what I did, I flew into Atlanta, rent a car, went back, spent Christmas with my family and back. | ||
| Then I went back to Atlanta on the 6th of January of 1971. I had a cousin in there, so she was at the airport. | ||
| I had a flight who lived in Atlanta, Houston, Houston, San Francisco. | ||
| I had like four hours overlay in San Francisco. | ||
| And then I found out there was another plane stopping in Dallas one hour later. | ||
| So I changed that to stay with my cousin one more hour. | ||
| So when I got to Vietnam, nobody was waiting for me. | ||
| So when I got in there, I went to the embassy, to a dog hotel, our hotel changed. | ||
| When I got to the embassy, they told me, I said, what are you doing here? | ||
| I said, what do you mean? | ||
| I was supposed to arrive today. | ||
| Nobody was waiting for me. | ||
| I said, no, no, no. | ||
| Your plane was hijacked to Cuba. | ||
| We're trying to find out how the hell we can get you out of there. | ||
| That's why when we went, the agency sent me and my family to Argentina in 1973, they got our passport, our passport of my wife and I said, place of birth, Colorado instead of Cuba, for that trip. | ||
| So in case I got hijacked, they could claim me as a U.S. citizen. | ||
| That was the only time I was a U.S. citizen by birth for about a year. | ||
| I have a copy of the passport. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Did you ever meet Fidel Castro? | ||
| No. | ||
| I wish I had, because he would not be there a long time ago. | ||
| What do you think of Cuba now? | ||
| It's a disaster. | ||
| I don't know how they are still able to stand the way it is. | ||
| The economy is completely on the ground. | ||
| I cannot understand these people who talk about socialism, who talk about progressive. | ||
| Look, whatever socialism touched, completely destroyed. | ||
| Look what happened to Cuba. | ||
| It was one of the most prosperous islands in 1958. You know, the dollar, if you know, the Cuban peso was higher than 3 cents than the dollar. | ||
| You wanted to buy Cuban peso, you had to pay 1 dollar and 3 cents for the Cuban dollar. | ||
| The same like the Dominican Republic. | ||
| It destroyed the economy. | ||
| Look at Venezuela, the richest country in America, with the reserving oil, unbelievable. | ||
| And look how it is. | ||
| Whatever they touch, they destroy it. | ||
| That's why I have been very concerned in this country of all of these people talking about socialism, all of that. | ||
| They have no idea what it is. | ||
| Unfortunately, we have a lot of professors in the university that inculcate this idea that they have never lived through. | ||
| That's what I tell people when I talk to them. | ||
| People can tell you what socialism is when they have never lived. | ||
| When you live in there, you see what happened to you, you understand what socialism is. | ||
| And we know because we suffered that in our own flesh. | ||
| Have you ever been back? | ||
| No, I can't. | ||
| I had three death sentences in absentia. | ||
| Well, I was back the last time, it was in 1965, but I was with a team to photograph a Soviet submarine base in La Siguanea in the Isle of Pines. | ||
| But that's the only time that I've touched Cuban soil, but I never... | ||
| How did you... | ||
| You said you went back a number of times. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| In a clandestine way. | ||
| How did you get in? | ||
| By both, clandestinely. | ||
| We had people working for us in the inside who would contact us at the coastline. | ||
| And you trusted them? | ||
| You were never worried about being betrayed or executed? | ||
| We had to trust them. | ||
| We had no choice. | ||
| There were people that were betrayed later on, but I was lucky as hell. | ||
| Really. | ||
| I was very, very lucky. | ||
| Did they get out, the people who helped you? | ||
| Some of them are still living there. | ||
| But nobody knew that they worked or helped us. | ||
| Did you just go from Key West? | ||
| Or how did you... | ||
| Well, it was in between Key West and Isla Morada. | ||
| A boat would pick us up in there, take off to the mother boat, and then we'll take off for Cuba from there, for the operation inside Cuba, in and out. | ||
| Only one team, from the Bay of Peaks people who entered Cuba, only one team made it by air. | ||
| They were parachuted in, only five people. | ||
| Most of us entered by boat clandestinely, and there was a... | ||
| Group of about five or six who came in through the airport with the real names, with cover stories that they were coming back from American universities. | ||
| But most of us came in clandestinely by boat. | ||
| And the mechanism was we would go to the coastline. | ||
| There was a reception team there with lights. | ||
| We disembarked. | ||
| Then there was a guy who would take us maybe four or five kilometers into the main highway where a car from the movement would pick us up and take us to a safe house in Havana. | ||
| We had to trust them. | ||
| We had no idea who they were. | ||
| But we were lucky. | ||
| Was anyone from the CIA, any of these teams ever caught? | ||
| No, personnel from the CIA itself, they never participated inside Cuba. | ||
| They didn't allow them. | ||
| There were only Cubans involved in that operation. | ||
| We CIA case officer. | ||
| We don't call it the controller. | ||
| We call it a case officer. | ||
| Were any of them ever caught, though, by the Cuban government? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Our people did, yes. | ||
| From my infiltration team. | ||
| Four of them were executed by firing a squad. | ||
| One of them was killed defending a safe house. | ||
| And there were 17 of them who had spent 20 years in Cuban prison. | ||
| Because when the treaty became to release the brigade from prison, our people, even though we were brigade members, were not considerate who landed military. | ||
| They considered us a spy because we came to become a destiny. | ||
| So we were not part of that exchange of prisoners. | ||
| So my people from my infiltration team spent 18-20 years in prison before they were released. | ||
| Did they come to the U.S. when they got out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Amazing. | ||
| So a lot of people got caught and killed. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| It was a disaster. | ||
| What do you think of the CIA now? | ||
| It's not what we used to be. | ||
| I recall in my time, we were given a task. | ||
| We would run an operation if there is any problem. | ||
| Then we went to our legal service, you know, the council, to ask, you know, how we solve the problem. | ||
| Because of the situation that happened in the past, that a lot of agents have lost their retirement, all of that because of operation. | ||
| Now, they go, when they are given a mission, they go to the lawyer first and find out what they can do and what they cannot do. | ||
| And they put a tremendous disadvantage on us. | ||
| In my time, you could do a hell of a lot of more things than they can do right now. | ||
| They tried their best anyway. | ||
| And the guy who really destroyed the CIA was Jimmy Carter. | ||
| How? | ||
| Well, I talked to Shackley. | ||
| He told me about it. | ||
| We had very high penetration, for example, in Al-Qaeda and in Sendero Luminoso. | ||
| If we had those people, 9-11 would have never happened. | ||
| When Jimmy Carter became president, he asked for a briefing from the CIA. He wanted to know how those penetrations were handled. | ||
| So Shackley was the one who was in charge, because he told me personally, he was the one in charge to brief the President Carter on that. | ||
| So he told the President that if you have a guy who infiltrate into a cell, if the guy was coming to more and more access, higher in the organization, he would come up, for example, with an operation that we're going to do, a terrorist operation. | ||
| So there is a very pragmatic group who will study the operation. | ||
| It was very minimal. | ||
| Uh, damages they will allow the operation to go through because if every time you have a guy inside and the operation failed, they know somebody's infiltrated in there. | ||
| So there you have to allow some operation to go through with minimal casualties. | ||
| Jimmy Carter said it was immoral to do that. | ||
| So he actually ordered all of those penetrations to be terminated. | ||
| So people that took years to be able to be able to get them and set them in inside the nets like in Al-Qaeda or Sendero Luminoso, they had to be told, sorry, we cannot support you anymore. | ||
| We recommend that you leave the cell. | ||
| We cannot pay you anymore and terminate it. | ||
| So we lost all of our eyes and ears inside the terrorist group with Jimmy Carter. | ||
| And he put a lot of emphasis on satellite. | ||
| Satellite doesn't get inside the head of people. | ||
| So we lost that. | ||
| That's why we had 9-11. | ||
| We had the Sendero Luminoso take over the embassy of Japan in Peru at that time. | ||
| If we had what we had before, that would have never happened. | ||
| Then it was authorized, but it would take a long time to rebuild that type of situation. | ||
| The CIA, it seems more a military force now than it once did. | ||
| Do you think that's accurate? | ||
| No, we have always the CIA military branch. | ||
| We have our own, for example, Air Force. | ||
| We have our own Navy with different specific equipment that nobody else has that have been developed for a special operation with us. | ||
| And there is a paramilitary apparatus, which I belong to. | ||
| We used to call it Special Operations Division, now they call it Special Activity Division, that operates paramilitary operations in areas, and they do a tremendous job. | ||
| That's the thing that we never get recognized for. | ||
| People are blamed, the CIA is blamed for many things that happened but there is a lot of successes that can never be told. | ||
| We have saved a lot of lives in the process that nobody knows about it and nobody can take credit for the situation. | ||
| We have in our world several stars with more than 100 people have died within the CIA. Most of them don't even have the name in their only one star because they were so classified that the name never appeared. | ||
| So you have to be dedicated to do that because it's one of the organizations that receives very little credit and do a lot of it. | ||
| Where do you think this country is going right now? | ||
| Well, I hope it changes. | ||
| A lot of people used to say in Cuba it could not happen here. | ||
| A lot of people say it could not happen in the United States. | ||
| After what happened in Cuba, where I have seen other places, I am concerned about this country. | ||
| I hope that we can regain the presidency because this thing goes to what they call socialism. | ||
| It would be a disaster. | ||
| We would never know the United States the way it is. | ||
| I am concerned because I know what happened in Cuba. | ||
| Unfortunately, we have a lot of professors at high-level universities who are leftists, who are brainwashing the head of a lot of our Bright student, and that's a very concern to me. | ||
| Have you seen that in other countries? | ||
| But more in the United States than any place else. | ||
| They have concentrated in the United States because they know the importance of the United States. | ||
| And that's what is really concerning in this country here. | ||
| I think this coming election is very important. | ||
| I don't know who the hell is going to be the president, but if the Democrats get the power in there and they continue the way they are with the open border and all of that, in a few years we will know. | ||
| Know the United States the way it is now today. | ||
| We can lose the United States. | ||
| I never thought I could say that, but now I can say that I'm very concerned. | ||
| How can it be stopped? | ||
| Well, I hope that people realize what's going on. | ||
| They were always going on in the United States and people realize and vote intelligently this time. | ||
| See the reality of what's going on. | ||
| And I want to say more, I think people intelligence will be able to understand that. | ||
| Looking back, my last question, if you could do something different with your life, would you have? | ||
| It seems like you got into this kind of amazing line of work almost accidentally. | ||
| I always wanted to be a civil engineer. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really. | |
| My grandson now is in the third year of civil engineering at the University of Washington, George Washington University. | ||
| But that's what I wanted to be. | ||
| And look, history took me to a different place. | ||
| I was never able to graduate from high school. | ||
| I graduated from high school, never from university. | ||
| My son and my daughter did. | ||
| My wife did when she was at Barrett University, but I didn't. | ||
| But I don't complain. | ||
| I think that I had a life that I can see myself and think that I Contributed a little bit to have a better world that we have today. | ||
| And I don't regret what I did. | ||
| No one better. | ||
| Well, you certainly had the most interesting life of almost anyone I've ever talked to. | ||
| So that's worth a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, sir. | |
| Mr. Rodriguez, thank you very much for telling us all that. |
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