Rafael Quintero
CIA agent sent after Castro
"If I were ever granted immunity, and compelled
to testify about past actions, about Dallas and the Bay of Pigs, it would be
the biggest scandal ever to rock the United States." - Rafael "Chi Chi" Quintero
Tuesday 24 October 2006
Rafael Quintero Ibarbia, intelligence agent: born 16
September 1940; married (two sons, one daughter); died Baltimore, Maryland 1
October 2006.
Recruited by the US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) after the 1959 Cuban revolution, Rafael Quintero spent years trying to
get rid of the Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, preferably, in the
words of the CIA, "with extreme prejudice". According to now
declassified CIA documents, he was involved in many assassination attempts
against Castro in the early years of the Caribbean island's Communist regime,
with plots which included an exploding cigar, poisoned shampoo and a
contaminated scuba diving wetsuit.
It was one of Quintero's long-time friends and
partners among the CIA's Cuban field agents, Félix Rodriguez, who tracked
Guevara down in Bolivia in 1967, organized his capture, interrogated him and,
according to most reports, ordered his execution, before pocketing his Rolex
watch as a souvenir.
In 1961, with the help of the CIA, Quintero was
smuggled into Cuba as an underground vanguard for the Bay of Pigs invasion,
when anti-Communist Cuban exiles, backed by the US President John F. Kennedy,
attempted to take over the island but were swiftly routed by Castro's forces.
Quintero was uncovered and captured by Castro's intelligence agents just before
the invasion but, to his own surprise, escaped execution and was expelled.
More than two decades later, and still in the pay of
the CIA, the exiled Cuban, widely known by the nickname "Chi Chi",
was a key player in the so-called Iran-Contra scandal, when, during the Reagan
administration, he helped Lt-Col Oliver North illegally ship weapons to the
Contra guerrillas fighting the Communist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. It
emerged that North had been the middle man in a three-way deal, all of it
secret and illegal, to ship US arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's fundamentalist
regime in Iran in return for the release of American hostages in Lebanon. The
profits went to buy weapons for the Contras.
Apparently under North's orders, Quintero set up and
ran the arms-for-the-Contras branch of the operation, based at airstrips in El
Salvador and Costa Rica, with the protection of US military advisers legally
based in the Central American nations. Recruited by Quintero to run the
operation at Ilopango airport in El Salvador was another Cuban exile, his old
friend Luis Posada Carriles, currently in "immigration detention" in
the US and wanted as a "terrorist" in both Cuba and Venezuela for
allegedly blowing up a Cuban airliner bound for Venezuela in 1976, and killing
all 73 people on board.
The Iran-Contra scheme was rumbled when a US
transport aircraft which had taken off from Ilopango, loaded with weapons, was
shot down over Nicaragua by the Sandinistas and an American civilian crewman,
Eugene Hasenfus, captured. Hasenfus named the CIA, and particularly two Cuban
Americans, Quintero and Rodriguez, as being behind the operation to ship arms
to the Contras in Nicaraguan border zones.
Rafael Quintero Ibarbia was born in the Camagüey
province of Cuba in 1940. As a student, he joined the underground resistance to
the military dictator General Fulgencia Batista and, aged 18, fought with
Castro's forces in the Sierra Maestra during the last days of the revolution. After
the revolution was successful in January 1959, Quintero opposed Castro's shift
towards Communism, fled to the US in November 1959 and helped found the
Movement for the Recovery of the Revolution (MRR), the first of many Cuban
exile groups which were to become a powerful lobby in Florida.
The group, along with a CIA-trained sabotage and
assassination squad known as Operation 40 (nicknamed "The Shooter
Team"), found their closest political ally in the US Attorney-General
Robert Kennedy, who, according to Quintero, oversaw the entire Bay of Pigs
operation in 1961. The disastrous outcome of the would-be invasion shocked
Quintero and proved a turning point in Castro's popularity and a major setback
for US attempts to control the island.
Quintero had helped build the training camps in
Guatemala, where the 1,500-strong force of Cuban exiles planned the Bay of Pigs
invasion, before he slipped onto the island to prepare the ground. The rout of
the invaders turned into a fiasco, both for them and for JFK, who had supported
the invasion but at the last minute withdrew vital US military air support.
"We thought the Americans worked the way John
Wayne worked in his movies," Quintero was later quoted as saying.
"The Americans hated Communism and, like John Wayne, they never lost -
ever." As it turned out, Castro's success multiplied his domestic
popularity and set him on course for a lifetime of standing up to his
superpower neighbor.
Between the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco and the
assassination of JFK in 1963, which included the cliffhanger Soviet nuclear
missile crisis of October 1962, Castro was Washington's main preoccupation and
Quintero's anti- Communist exile group received endless funds and carte blanche
to get rid of him one way or another.
"I had the good luck to become a friend of
Bobby Kennedy," Quintero said in 1996: "Bob Kennedy was obsessed. He
had to get even with Castro. He mentioned this often to me and was very clear
about it. He was not going to try to eliminate Castro because he was an ideological
guy. He was going to do it because the Kennedy name had been humiliated. He
mentioned it clearly to me one day. We went to the circus one day and he
mentioned it to me.
After the assassination of JFK, when it emerged that
Lee Harvey Oswald was pro-Castro and had attempted to get to Cuba, the group
known as Operation 40, and notably the name Rafael Quintero, were mentioned in
several of the conspiracy theories that spread over the years. The Cubans, one
theory went, never forgave JFK for withholding air support during the Bay of
Pigs, effectively condemning them to defeat and, in many cases, execution.
If Quintero had any such secrets, he took them with
him to his grave. But he was once quoted as saying: "If I were ever
granted immunity, and compelled to testify about past actions, about Dallas and
the Bay of Pigs, it would be the biggest scandal ever to rock the United
States."
Phil Davison
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