OBITUARIES
OCT. 19, 2006
Rafael Quintero, 66, Secret Agent Who Stalked Castro
for C.I.A., Dies
Rafael Quintero, a daring secret agent in the most
dangerous American covert operations against Fidel Castro, died Oct. 1 in
Baltimore. He was 66.
His death, after a history of kidney failure, was
kept almost as secret as his life as a spy, until last night. It was confirmed
at a memorial service in Miami by Felix Rodriguez, a fellow veteran of the Bay
of Pigs and the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 1960, Mr. Quintero, not yet 21, signed up with
the C.I.A. He worked against Cuba side by side with Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy in the days when the United States tried to kill Mr. Castro.
Years later, Mr. Quintero conspired with Lt. Col. Oliver L. North against the
Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
But, as with millions of his fellow Cubans, the
central event of Mr. Quintero’s life was the Bay of Pigs invasion of April
1961.
He helped build the camps in Guatemala where the
C.I.A. trained the rebels who were hoping to overthrow Mr. Castro. When the
battle was joined, Mr. Quintero had been in Cuba for months, part of the small
rebel force that infiltrated the island in advance of the invasion.
After almost every member of the C.I.A. strike force
of 1,500 exiles was killed or imprisoned, Mr. Quintero went on the run inside
Cuba. He and his allies were in shock, he said at a 1996 conference of Bay of
Pigs veterans, recorded in the book “Politics
of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined.”
“We thought the Americans worked the way John Wayne
worked in his movies,” Mr. Quintero said. “The Americans hated communism and,
like John Wayne, they never lost — ever.” But he said 9 of every 10 Cubans
decided to go with the winner after the Bay of Pigs.
He made his way out of Cuba and wound up in
Washington. He worked closely with Attorney General Kennedy on the anti-Castro
movement.
“Kennedy was obsessed,” he said at the 1996
conference, “that the Kennedy family had lost a big battle against a guy like
Castro. He really wanted to get even with him.”
Mr. Quintero continued working on operations against
Mr. Castro, including assassination plots, according to declassified government
documents. After President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, direct American
support for most anti-Castro operations began to die down.
By 1965, the White House had turned off the missions
aimed at killing Mr. Castro. What Mr. Quintero did for the next decade is still
secret. In 1977, he reported to the C.I.A. that one of its former officers had
offered him $1 million to kill a Libyan dissident in Egypt.
During the Reagan administration, as he testified at
Colonel North’s criminal trial, Mr. Quintero was being paid $4,000 a month to
make sure clandestine arms shipments got to the contras, the American-backed
forces trying to overthrow Nicaragua, despite a Congressional ban on direct
American support for them.
Rafael Quintero Ibarbia, whose friends called him
Chi Chi, was born in Camagüey, in the center of Cuba, on Sept. 16, 1940. His
friends remember him as a short, smart man with a sharp, bitter sense of humor.
His survivors include his wife, Dolores, and their children Alejandro, Marie
and Rafael.
As a teenager in the 1950’s, Mr. Quintero joined the
underground resistance against Fulgencio Batista, the corrupt right-wing
dictator of Cuba. After Mr. Castro’s rebels won power in January 1959, Mr.
Quintero said, he was expelled from the vanguard of the revolution for refusing
to join the Communist Party. He joined the anti-Castro Movement to Recover the
Revolution and became part of the C.I.A.’s grand scheme to overthrow his
government.
The agency had assumed that the invasion would lead
to an uprising. Few Americans understood that “there was a resistance long
before the United States government decided to overthrow Fidel Castro,” Mr.
Quintero reflected. “The resistance came first and then later the United States
destroyed it.”
TIM WEINER
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