“All we have to do is dig and skedaddle,” she said, making a joke of it.
But De Salvo remained serious. “Look, Alex,” he said, “I’ll ramble a bit and tell you this: the United States is going to have to bite a few bullets and prepare for a reasonable transition in Cuba. We don’t have a lot of good intelligence coming from the island to guide us. That’s why someone like Violette could be important; that’s why I’m guessing the people at Langley want you to ride shotgun with Guarneri. Fresh eyes on the island. You remember how Russia and Eastern Europe crashed into ‘gangsterism’ after the fall of Communism in the 1980s? Well, imagine the Mafia returning to Cuba and doing business with the narcogobiernos of Mexico and Colombia. The U.S. would quickly find itself with the Latin American drug wars ninety miles off the coast of Florida. That would be a whole lot less convenient than a bearded old Bolshevik in an army uniform trying to hang onto the last gasp of his Commie dream.”
“The American mob pretty much ran the island before Castro, right?”
“Absolutely,” De Salvo said. “That’s why Fidel had popular support. The brutal dictatorship under Batista was completely on the payroll of the American Mafia. Meyer Lansky was the key guy. The mob wanted to establish the Cuban government as a fully owned subsidiary of their interests. They had plans to make Havana the Monte Carlo of North America. Anything you wanted that was illegal in the U.S., you could get legally in Havana. Drugs. Women. Sex shows. Gambling.”
“And the mob lost all its interests when Castro took over in 1959?”
“Absolutely,” De Salvo said. “The big shots got out of Cuba fast. A lot of their middle-to lower-level people ended up in jail or in front of firing squads.”
“Which explains why the U.S. government enlisted the mob to help kill Castro, right?”
“Absolutely right again. I was a young kid working at the Justice Department when a lot of this stuff came to light in the ‘70s,” De Salvo said. “Fresh out of law school and two years working as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago. The attempts on Castro’s life from the United States go way back to Eisenhower. Ike set up ‘Operation Mongoose.’ The CIA had several hundred people working on this project, including anti-Castro people who were left-behinds in Cuba. The CIA trained a paramilitary guerilla force inside Cuba to remove Castro. But Fidel was enormously popular on the island, at least back then. So the idea was scrapped by Ike, and the job was left to Kennedy. That was the first time the Mafia was hired, during the Kennedy years. The mob wanted its businesses back and JFK had friends in the mob. So it all made sense. If Castro were killed by the Mafia, the CIA could wash their hands of the job. So you had this back-alley spectacle of the FBI working with the Mafia, offering a certain amount of immunity for a bunch of hoods in the U.S. in exchange for the death of Castro.”
“Much like the way my acquaintance Yuri Federov got his tax breaks,” said Alex.
“And much like the way Lucky Luciano got parole after World War II – for helping the United States Navy with the invasion of Sicily,” De Salvo said. “When the CIA was planning the Bay of Pigs invasion, the agency asked their contacts in Cuba to assess the chances that an invasion would set off a popular uprising. The CIA also asked the mob to identify the roads that Castro might use to deploy troops and tanks in meeting attacking forces. The wiseguys asked their old contacts who were still in Cuba to set up a network of spies. Idiotic idea. The CIA at its worst. They were dealing with a bunch of crooks. The contacts told the CIA exactly what it wanted to hear. They claimed that they’d found that an insurrection was in the works, but of course, it never came off. Still hasn’t. And you didn’t need spies to tell you about the roads near where the Bay of Pigs invasion was planned. There was only one road to the beach, and any local sugar cane farmer could have told you where that was. We were flying spy planes at low altitude over the island all the time, and the single road was visible from the air. It was the road the Cuban army used to beat back the invasion.”
Alex shook her head.
“If I remember correctly,” De Salvo said, “the whole concept of ‘Operation Mongoose’ went completely haywire. JFK put his brother Robert, the Attorney General, in charge of getting rid of Castro. They hatched out a new program called ‘Operation Freedom.’ That’s when it went from dumb to dumber to dumbest. During a United Nations meeting that Castro attended, some CIA dupe slipped a poison cigar into Fidel’s cigar case. The CIA thought it would be a certain way to knock him off, but someone inspected the cigar case and figured it out before Fidel lit up. The same CIA agents had originally planned to give Castro a cigar with a mini-bomb in it. That never went to fruition either.”
De Salvo was shaking his head and laughing now. So was Alex, laughing from the absurdity of it all.
“Another plan was to slip Castro a cigar spiked with LSD,” De Salvo said. “The plan was that after he smoked it, he would be an obvious head case and everybody would think he was nuts. Castro was also fond of scuba diving. So the CIA sprayed a scuba suit with tuberculosis bacteria. They gave the suit to an American lawyer who was going to Cuba to negotiate for the release of prisoners from the Bay of Pigs. At the last minute, they chickened out, saying that even if it did work it would be too obvious and would cause a national embarrassment to the U.S. Another half-wit idea was to set a trap at one of his favorite diving spots. The trap would be an exploding conch shell. This one wasn’t carried out because planners thought it would be far too difficult to prepare.”
De Salvo’s fingers fiddled with some paperclips on his desk.
“When one of Castro’s bodyguards turned against him and offered to kill him, the CIA gave the guy a fountain pen full of poison. It worked like a syringe, shooting poison out of its tip. That didn’t work either.”
“Why didn’t they just go the normal route?” Alex asked. “Guns. Assassins.”
“Oh, they tried that plenty of times,” De Salvo said. “The CIA sent Cuban exiles into Cuba with telescopic rifles, but Fidel was too smart. He knew what had happened with Trujillo in the Dominican Republic …” De Salvo paused. “And what had happened to Kennedy. I mean, read all that JFK assassination stuff, and the words Mafia and Cuba surface almost every other sentence.”
“So I recall,” she said.
“Last time I checked,” De Salvo concluded, “there’d been more than seven hundred plots to kill Castro, mostly involving the mob, hatched out of the United States. Imagine the odds. Seven hundred different plans against the man – and not one worked! In spite of everything, Castro lived into his eighties and ruled for more than forty years. Amazing.” De Salvo frowned. “Did you talk about any of this with your Guarneri pal?”