Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero - Obit

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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