Morley with Jenkins
'If You Need a Dirty Job Done': Straight Talk from a Marine Vet About a CIA Plot to Assassinate Castro
16 Jun
2022
Military.com | By
Jefferson Morley
At 95
years of age, Carl Elmer Jenkins is one profane Marine. His mordant memories of
serving as a CIA paramilitary trainer in the combat zones of Vietnam,
Indonesia, Laos and Cuba are salted with F-bombs and S-words about the A-holes
he worked for. "What do you really think, sir?" is not a question a
visiting reporter needs to ask Carl Jenkins.
I first
caught up with Jenkins in April 2021, having been drawn in by his legendary
reputation. Over the next year, I wound up spending several days with him,
spellbound by his stories. We sat at his dining room table, occasionally taking
a break to stand on his patio. He trudged about the house with a cane,
complained good-naturedly about the trials of old age, and did not hesitate to
answer questions about his role in an infamous CIA plot to assassinate Cuban
ruler Fidel Castro that fell apart five decades ago.
Jenkins
grew up in a shack without indoor plumbing near Shreveport, Louisiana. After
signing up for the Marines at age 17, he served in the Pacific during World War
II, rising from private to staff sergeant. Upon his return, he went back to
school and graduated from Centenary College. In 1950, he finished first among
372 officers in a Marine Corps training
program at Quantico,
Virginia. He joined the CIA in 1952 as a survival, evasion, resistance and
escape instructor.
Among
his first assignments was training small teams for maritime infiltration of
Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. Then, he served as chief of
a CIA base in Guatemala, where he trained the leaders of Brigade 2506, the
U.S.-backed invasion force that was defeated at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in
April 1961. In his bedroom, Jenkins has a plaque from the brigade commending
him "for outstanding services beyond the call of duty.
In
Vietnam, Jenkins served in Danang, organizing U.S. Special Forces to
carry out sabotage attacks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Later, he served as a top
counterinsurgency adviser to governments in the Dominican Republic and
Nicaragua. In 1971, he became chief of a CIA base in southern Laos, where he
guided and trained 10,000-plus regular and guerrilla forces, while calling in
the occasional B-52
Stratofortress strike. In retirement, he debriefed Cuban militants for
the CIA and served as an unpaid consultant to President Ronald Reagan's State
Department during the Iran-Contra affair.
"I
was one of the handful of people in the agency that was trained and experienced
in paramilitary operations," he told me. "I could indeed bring down a
government. Or I could protect the government by getting rid of the insurgents.
Either way. And the word goes around. 'Hey, if you need a dirty job done, call
Jenkins.' And they did. And I went."
Marine
Corps veteran Carl Elmer Jenkins served as a CIA paramilitary trainer in the
combat zones of Vietnam, Indonesia, Laos and Cuba. (Photo courtesy of Carl
Elmer Jenkins)
Jenkins
still swaggers in his war stories. He recalled how he and his first wife ran a
U.S. military guesthouse in Danang while his Vietnamese girlfriend ran a bar
across the street. "You never knew who was a communist in that city,"
he sighed.
But he
is no braggart, occasionally waxing doleful about his career in covert action.
"I've had maybe three major successes," he muttered, "and a hell
of a lot of failures."
I showed
Jenkins a file of declassified cables about the AMLASH affair, a notorious CIA
plot to kill Castro in the early 1960s. Jenkins' name appeared in dozens of
documents. As far as I knew, he was the last living American who participated
in a covert operation whose disclosure led to fundamental changes at the CIA.
The
revelation of the AMLASH plot in a 1976 report of Senate investigators proved
to be a pivotal moment in the CIA's history. Coming directly after the
Watergate scandal, the disclosure that the agency had plotted to kill Castro --
on the very day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas --
was a sensational news story, triggering public outrage, conspiratorial
suspicions, and multiple investigations.
The CIA
saw its secrets laid bare, its budget slashed, its reputation tarnished, and,
as a result, congressional oversight of the agency was imposed. While Castro
gloated, the agency's public image took a hit that the men and women of Langley
have always preferred to downplay, if not bury.
When I
showed Jenkins the declassified file, first made public in 2018, he opened up
with a colorful choice of words.
"Eisenhower
did not want the Bay of Pigs and neither did I," he scoffed, referencing
the CIA's ill-fated invasion plan in 1961. "I was chief of base on that
f---ing operation." President John F. Kennedy was "a loser," he
said, adding his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy was worse.
"Everything he touched, turned to s---."
With the
paper trail in front of him, Jenkins recalled the plot to kill Castro in fine
detail, laying to rest any lingering historical controversy about who actually
orchestrated the unsuccessful conspiracy to end the life of the Cuban communist
leader who later died of natural causes in 2016 a few months after his 90th
birthday.
Richard
Helms, the gentlemanly CIA director with a reputation for keeping the darkest
of secrets, insisted in his memoir and on Capitol Hill that the AMLASH
operation was playing at tilting domestic politics in Cuba by fomenting
political opposition.
"It
was not an assassination operation," Helms testified under oath to
Congress. "It was not designed for that purpose. I think I do know what
I'm talking about here."
Historians
have tended to take Helms' denials at face value.
"When
people wanted to invade Cuba or kill Castro, his attitude was, 'Oh, God,'"
Helms' biographer Thomas Powers told Chris Whipple, author of "The
Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future," a
much-lauded 2020 profile of CIA directors.
"He
just was so against it all," said wife Cynthia Helms of the plots to kill
Castro. "He said to me one day, 'I was never going to do it. We were never
going to do it.' But they made his life miserable over it."
Was
AMLASH an assassination operation? I asked Jenkins.
"Of
course," snorted the retired Marine.
The
AMLASH saga began late one night in October 1956 in the Montmartre, Havana's
swankiest nightclub. Two young men in the crowd pulled out pistols and shot
dead Col. Antonio Blanco Rico, the chief of the Cuban military intelligence
service, outside the club's elevators.
One of
the gunmen was Rolando Cubela, a medical student at the University of Havana
who had taken up arms against the dictatorship of President Fulgencio Batista.
After Castro and allied forces ousted Batista in 1959, Cubela assumed a series
of senior positions in the new government. As a Catholic and nationalist,
Cubela loathed Castro's hard left turn toward one-party socialism.
The CIA
men, who knew of Cubela's armed exploits, targeted him for recruitment under
the code name AMLASH. (All Cuba operations were identified by the AM diagraph,
followed by a chosen noun; Castro was known as AMTHUG).
Helms
sent an up-and-coming CIA officer, Nestor Sanchez, to Brazil to take over the
handling of Cubela, who continued to have personal access to Castro. Sanchez
was handing a poison pen to Cubela in a CIA safehouse in Paris on Nov. 22,
1963, when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Sanchez, who would go on to hold
senior positions in the CIA and Pentagon, was "a good friend,"
Jenkins said.
When
Jenkins returned from Vietnam to the Cuba program in early 1964, he was cleared
into the AMLASH operation. Sanchez, he explained, was replaced as Cubela's
contact by Manuel "Manolo" Artime, a foe of Castro's with a knack for
charming U.S. officials. "Manolo was a perpetual juvenile … a guy who
loved everybody and just assumed that everybody loved him," Jenkins said.
In our
interview, Jenkins reviewed five memos that he wrote about the AMLASH project
in 1964, recalling that he had dictated them but never seen the paper copies.
Another declassified
memo showed that the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center
supported Jenkins on a "plan to assassinate Castro at the DuPont Varadero
Beach Estate, east of Havana. Castro was known to frequent the estate and the
plan was to use a high-powered rifle in the attempt."
Jenkins
said he voiced doubts about whether Cubela could be trusted. Having trained two
former Castro bodyguards for Brigade 2506, "I knew pretty well what his
habits were ... what his intimate daily routine was like," Jenkins said.
He recalled asking Artime, "Who is this guy and what is he up to? You
know, just exactly what are we dealing with here? Is this real or is this a
trap of some sort?"
Jenkins'
caution was ignored and, when Artime and Cubela met in Madrid in December 1964,
Cubela reiterated his demand for a weapon to kill Castro, specifically a
Belgian-made FAL rifle.
"The
FAL was the NATO rifle," Jenkins explained. "It was easy to get
ammunition for it. That was something I could do."
Thanks
to Jenkins' arrangements, Artime delivered the weapon to Cubela in Cuba. When
Cubela was arrested in March 1966 and charged with plotting to kill Castro, the
FAL rifle was found in his possession. Cubela was sentenced to a 25-year jail
term, of which he served only half.
Some
have speculated that Cubela was a double agent for Castro all along. Castro
denied that, and so did Helms. It was just about the only thing the
revolutionary and the spymaster ever publicly agreed upon.
"I
don't accept the fact that he was working for anybody except Cubela,"
Jenkins told me.
In any
case, Jenkins' first-person account of supplying the murder weapon,
corroborated by CIA files, extinguishes Helms' claim that AMLASH was not an
assassination conspiracy.
"Just
another busted operation," the ex-Marine shrugged. As for Helms, "he
was an a--hole as far as I'm concerned," he growled.
--
Jefferson Morley is author of "Scorpions' Dance: The President, The
Spymaster, and Watergate" (St. Martin's Press), from which this article is
drawn.
Related: American
Veteran William Morgan Rose to the Highest Rank in Fidel Castro's Army
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