Transcript of 104-10301-10001.pdf
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DOOQ 104-10301-10001] 2025 RELEASE UNDER THE PRESIDENT JOHN F KENNEDY ASSASSINATION RECORDS ACT OF 1992
SECRET
CIA Internal U8 e Only
Acc e8 8 Controlled DDO
Hi SToRICAL STAFF
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENcY
WESTERN HEMISPHERE DIVISION
1946 1965
DDO HP 324
by
David R . Mcleaf
Approved;
424
David A Phillips
Chief Wes tern Hemisphere Division
Directorate of Operations
December 1973
VoLUME 1
No . 1 : WR
No - 2 : 0 /DDO
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by
Copy
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Latin American officers in Panama
)
and also supplied
material for the US Army Intelligence School
to use
in training foreign students
on Communism Nine CIA
officers lectured at a Fort Holabird
course for senior
Latin American officers in 1961 , capping their presenta-
tion by producing
a Soviet defector who spoke on the
Soviet intelligence
service . 267/
CIA maintained
a station in Havana throughout
1960 but faced increasing operational
difficulties -_
Some of CIA' s own making. Probably the outstanding
was the capture of three TSD technicians caught
L
Kevs "5 Ageney ofpicatina" nilyophoae this thopeext Coin China
made when the technicians
were released 18 months later,
showed that they had ignored many of the basic rules
of tradecraft. On the other hand, the Cubans had given
26 8 /
them perfunctory interrogations
In 1960 the Havana Station consisted of James
A< Noe17 chief of station; Arthur Avignon deputy;
9
about six case officers and as many secretaries _ Life
was unpleasant ; Castro agents shadowed American Em-
bassy personnel , monitored their te lephone conversa-
tions and tried to pump their children about what
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was doing . As relations between the United
States and Cuba deteriorated the station concentrated
on support for the Cuban invasion then being planned ,
and on developing stay-behind
assets _ Frank Belsito
and later Ralph Seehafer were designated as "stay -
behind officers" and regularly reported on a dozen
or S0 agents and nets , a few of which survived the
station' s closing. *
1
was
ptediceabiea bIegkaa dupiog Ehe fellt8o3 "196d Fafabay
dependents were moving themselves and their house -
hold effects back to the United States _ Avignon
made a special trip
on the Havana-Key West ferry
to take out his personal silverware , and a
S1,500 violin. Station files not absolutely
essen-
tial were crated and shipped back to Headquarters .
Case officers were working 15-hour
9
seven-day
weeks .
When the break came , the Embassy had three
days notice that it would close on 4 January 1961 _
The CIA station had just installed a new incinerator
* One stay-behind agent
2
AMFOX -1 ,
was still report -
in 1973 but WH Division believed he had been
doubled _
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daddy
car,
days
ing
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and managed to burn what files it could not ship to
Key West on the attache aircraft . When they we re
not burning papers or smashing te chnical equipment ,
case officers were
caching radios or
making advance
payments to agents left behind.
On 4 January station personnel met at the
EmbassY , rode in convoy to the ferry , and sailed to
the States A few , like William J Murray , had main-
tained houses until the end and lost everything in
269 /
them . *
This was the period when Fide 1 Cas as ye t
unrestrained by his more cautious and practical Soviet
L
Mdvfec |
Hemisphere
9
was
besd I3nd Roping U31nf Gzoubae phna%h the
"exporting the revolution A typical target was
Honduras the poorest and most primitive country in
Central America _ CIA" s reaction was als0 typical
of the "nation-building' and "institution-building"
approach to counte ring subversion
When Castro began his propaganda campaign in
* Two years later Congress authorized the Department
of State to reimburse its employees the depreciated
value of furnishings left in Cuba . Paymen ts fe11
far short of replacement costs
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of assets commencing with a close per-
s onal relationship be tween the station
chief and the President of Mexico, high -
leve 1 telephone taps photographic sur-
veillance
unilatefai
intelligence as
sets and a broad scale of covert action
capabilities_
Within a week of the inspector' s visit
Frederick W . Cole was relieved as chief of station
in La Paz , partly because of comments made by Ambas
sador Ben Stephansky , a former labor attache wh0 had
not worked closely with CIA_ Lyle T. Shannon COS
9
Panama City , left WH Division (perhaps coincidentally)
8 few months after the Inspector General had described
him thus :
The chief of station is a GS - 1 8 who
has served in many different posts in
the Agency He has been in Panama for
about five years _ A wide gap in human
relations exists between the chief of
station and his staff He is coldly
aloof and is reputed to brook no dif-
ference of on even on questions
of operational procedures He is a
hard-driving administrator His tal-
ents along this line are granted even
by the Ambassador who bluntly dis
credits his ability a5 an
intelligence
officer 275/
Although the separate Task Force W (TFW) was
=
not officially established until 8 March 1962 , the
planning and execution of the Bay of operation
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opini
Pigs
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were for al1 practical purposes conducted indepen -
dently of WH Division and therefore are not covered
in this history . There was an informal but under-
stood shortcut in the chain of command; basic deci 7
s ions were made at the DDP
)
DCI , or Pres idential
level. Although S ome of the personne1 were de -
tailed from WH Division , the Cuban Headquarters unit
was in another building and no one pretended that
J . C . was running the show .
Jacob D Esterline a veteran WH Division
officer who later became deputy chief of the divi-
L
aa; invasion OnLeftozpt] the acabtookhE; dordez theohihdup
DDP When the Cuban unit was made officially autono-
mous a5 TFW and later as the Special Affairs Staff
(SAS)
9
it was headed first by Willia K. Harvey and
then by Desmond FitzGerald Bruce B . Cheever and
John LS Hart , none of whom had previous service in
WH Division_ It was not until 1965 that the Cuban
unit really lost its autonomY and again came firmly
unde r WH Division
Actual expenditures in FY 1961 illustrate
the disparity between Cuban operations and the
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King
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parent WH Division In that yYear total ob ligations
99
for Cuban operations were /s41,498,743f or almost
99
four times the 611,003,991] spent in the rest of
Latin America. Except for Cuba 1961 was a repre -
sentative year, and these we re the obligations for
regular stations throughout the hemisphere:
Brazil 81,498,101 Colombia 8301,389
Mexico 1;384,505 Dominican 261,148
Vene zue la 922 ,424 Costa Rica 231 351
Argentina 802 ,302 El Salvador 222 ,037
Chile 646 768 Honduras 103 820 95
Panana 579,310 Nicaragua 92 , 0 88
Uruguay 521,082 Haiti 77 6 75
Guatemala 418,778 Paraguay 54,606
Peru 380 , 422 West Indies 41 864
Ecuador 336 ,36 7 Puerto Rico 24,37,7
Bolivia 303 ,210 276
Until the nearly 1,200 prisoners taken at the
of could be ransomed with shipments of
maceuticals
9
CIA regularly supported their dependents
in the United States. In the opinio of the General
Counsel , if a dependent had sued , courts would probab ly
have found that Cuban Brigade members were entitled to
the bene fits of the Federal Emp loyees Compensation
Act . Thus by mid-1962 CIA was disbursing 8311,500
per mon th to the dependents
9
plus bonuses and medical
care for invaders who managed to return These ex-
penses
9
however, were from special funds outs ide
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Rep .
Bay Pigs phar -
paid
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the WH Division budget
Probably Castro' s attempt to export his revo-
lution reached its peak in 1962 _ The first Castro-
inspired guerrilla action in Latin America occurred
in March of that year, when Indians in the interior
of Peru attacked the towns of Huampani and Satipo .
A Lima Station penetration agent identified their
leader a5 Cuban-trained and reported that radios and
weapons_ had been smuggled in from Cuba to start the
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attack-
At year' s end the US Government planned to
as semble for the Organization of American States a
white paper on Cuban subversion in Latin America,
and in February 1963 WH Division chiefs of station
met in Panama to discuss their contributions with
the DCI _ From this meeting came a
picture of Castro' s
campaign of subversion
Argentina reported that left-wing Peronists
were an attractive target for Cuba; police had cap -
tured a group of terrorists organized and directed
by John William Cooke
9 an ex-Peronist then in Cuba _
Bolivia knew of 217 activists trained in Cuba within
nine months and was looking forward to debriefing
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Everyone breathed easier _ and the Chief, WH
Division, described the operation as "one of the
most tightly held of our Cuban activities Two
years later the hold was not S0 tight , for on 26 March
1965 the' New York Times front-paged a' re asonab ly com -
plete and accurate account of the great sugar-sabotage
operation under the headline:
PRES IDENT KENNEDY BALKED
CIA PLOT ON RUSSIAN SUGAR
Press services picked
up the story United
L
V,8aa= GIGttg,athonan
but
addodfcqaf #wate FRougatinpeiveng
tion' foiled the Central Intelligence Agency S Carib -
283/
bean melodrama CIA, as usual had no comen t
For across the-board coverage of Cuba in
the early 1960 ' s the Mexico City Station was tops
Reporting on the Cuban Embassy , the COS said in Feb -
ruary 1963:
We intercept their mail,_photograph
a11 the people who go in and out of the
Embassy cover their telephones completely ,
and within a few hours of the conversa-
tions have resumes of al1 the phone calls
We cover their trash , and this has been
found to be useful And included in the
usefulness was the discovery of a man who
:
wa5 goaoupeactostion
8f the?Embashought was
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CIA had seven different microphones in the
Cub an Embassy , one hidden in a of the coffee
tab le in the Ambassador' s office Like most audio
operations this one produced
a lot of chaff but
it als0 yielded bits of operational information
showing connections be tween the Embassy and local
Comunists and students At the airport the station
was getting photographs of a11 trave llers to Cuba,
about 300 photos per of their passports
and documents 24
Included in the take from the Cuban Embassy
were the serial numbers of weapons bought by Commu -
nists for smuggling into Guatemala, plus the names
and positions of the sellers Complicating the ex-
ploitation 0f this information was the fact that the
we apons had been sold Mexican officials
9
and while
the station wanted to stop the smuggling and appre -
hend the Communist smugglers it had no desire to
upset sensitive relations with the Mexican Gove rnment
Two high-level officers of the Cuban Embassy ,
one of them the cultural attache were recruited CIA
penetrations The station had sent three agen ts into
Cuba and was getting reports from them by secret
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writing. Meanwhile it was servicing 17 accommoda -
tion addresses for Headquarters and Miami
In spite of a11 this there was little exploi-
table evidence that Cuba was using Mexico as a base
for subversion in the rest 0f Latin America _ Mexico
was the only Latin American nation to maintain diplo-
matic relations: with Cuba in the face of an OAS reso-
1
lution intended to isolate the island. Anxious to
retain this bridge to the Western Hemisphere Castro
had ordered his Embassy to do nothing which might be
284/
considered offensive by the Mexican Government
No such restraint was applied to Venezue la ,
where Castro-supported terrorism was rampant . On
2 November
1963 ,
on a tip from a campes the
Servicio de Inteligencia de las Fuerzas Armadas
46
(SIFA) found a cache of more than three tons f
Cuban arms on a beach on the Paraguana Peninsula
in northwest Venezuela . CIA learned about it promptly
through liaison_
Jonathan G . Hanke , a Caracas case_ officer,
brought sample weapons to
Washington, where CIA was
able to raise the serial numbers and Cuban Army in-
signia which had been ground off_ Richard Helms ,
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blocs in the country: Barrientos supported by the
campesinos; General Alfredo Ovando Candia , supported
by the army ; and the Communists and leftists sup-
ported by tough mine and factory workers _ To have
Barrientos elected, CIA first had to proote a_
credible election by underwriting the campaigns of
both the selected winner and his token opposition
at the polls
The real question was whe ther elections would
be he ld at al1. In 18 months the La Paz Station
spent $585 ,00 0 , first to persuade the armed forces
L
Eatrietod clamp doxo cu ,hehenftoscoj
convince
9
then Gvando hads]
should
not interfere and finally to promote enough politi-
cal opposition to make the election plausible _ In
a ` genuine tour de force, COS Lawrence M. Sternfield
produced what OAS observers called a democratic and
honest election- -and got the results from the elec-
toral tribunal four days be fore' the election
On 7 April 196 4 President Lyndon B. Johnson
presided at a White House mee ting which laid down
general guidelines for CIA action against Cuba _
Others at the meeting included Secretary of State
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De an Rusk , Secretary of De fense Robert S .. McNamara
> .
General Maxwell Taylor of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ,
Presidential Advisor McGeorge Bundy , DCI John A
McCone _ DDP Richard He lns and FitzGerald. There was
no question about charging CIA with the following
types of activity:
E
1 Collection of intelligence
2 Covert propaganda to encourage
low-risk forms of active and passive
resistance
3 . Cooperation with other agencies
1
in econante__ ranfendeait8 Ldentify
and estab =
lish contact with potential dissident
elements inside Cuba _
5 _ Indirect economic sabotage .
There was sharp disagreement , however , over
whether CIA should continue infiltrating sabotage
agents into Cuba _ McNamara , Taylor and McCone favored
more
s abotage. raids but Rusk and Bundy feared that
1
CIA raids might undermine the US "clean hands" 91 pos -
ture in the OAS or give the Soviets an excuse for
delaying turnover of their surface-to-air missile
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(SAM) sites to the Cubans
Finally Rusk recommended that CIA' s raiding
assets be ' kept in being but not actually used--at
least until the OAS and SAM sites prob lems could be
clarified. The: President accepted this recommenda -
tion _ Although CIA did try to keep: its sabotage
ready , the White House
decision spelled the
agents
end of the Agency' s. sabotage (though not support and
306_
inte
1ligence-collecting) infiltrations of Cuba.
Agency-sponsored radio propaganda aimed at
Cuba reached its in early 1965 with an actual
expenditure of about $1,500 , 00 0 and expans ion still
planned . The semi-notional Cuban Free dom . Committee
[
Gasved
a
as totcovof fot hoadio eckay ( Cubon Kficbnbroeds
in Miami
9
Key West , and New Orleans
Started in 1961 , the Cuban Freedom Committee
retained a
public relations firm and spent: $7,000
annually to establish its cover
by soliciting bona
fide public contributions In its first year these
totalled: $5,000 , but by 1965 lic support had dwin-
dled to $200 _ One of the difficulties: was that any
widespread US appeal for funds for Radio Free Cuba
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would perforce have to attack Castro, and might there -
fore be considered domestic propaganda exceeding
CIA' s
charter _
Outside the committee , CIA operated a trans -
mitter calling itself Radio Americas and broad -
cas from Swan Island and bought time for anti-
Cuban broadcasts from three commercial stations
Programming on these four stations totalled 119
hours_weekly in addition to the 77 on Radio Free
307 /
Cuba_
Swan Island roughly
a mile and a half long
and three-quarters of a mile wide , lies in the Carib-
bean 125 miles north of the Honduran coast Both the
1
UIsicnd Siatbe 1960 Fo, Fonduthe G3 KaedhecyGuciau h had @.a88
a weather station there since 1949
9
and CIA first set
up a covert transmitter in 1954 to support its propa-
ganda against the Arbenz regime in Guatemala _ *
Apart from the question of its real impact-in
Cuba and the psychological problems of a . staff living
* Under a 1971 agreement the US relinquished .its claim
to sovereignty but retained the right to operate a weather station
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in almost total isolation , the Swan Island transmitter
raised a nightmare of cover complications , Operating
as Radio Americas it was supposedly under cover of
the Vanguard Service Corporation
9 an
Agency proprie -
tary which offered no services , and the Gibraltar
Steamship Corporation , another proprietary which
operated no
steamships _ A Boston millionaire who
claimed to Own the island collected rent from the
Vanguard Corporation , which could not afford to argue,
but not from the Weather Bureau
)
which disputed his
claim_ Vanguard contracted with Coastal Air of
Miami for one light-aircraft supply flight a week
and with the Logistics Service Corporation of Phila-
delphia , a
Philco subsidiary , to maintain the island
facilities and transmitting equipment . Al1 of this
enabled CIA to play tapes and broadcast the commen -
taries of the three Cuban announcers stationed on
the island , but it did not prevent Radio Habana
from pinpointing the transmitter and calling it a
308_
CIA propaganda mechanism _
Nevertheless in early 1965 Congressman Roman
96
C. Pucinski (D- I11.) , a member of the Cuban Freedom
Comittee executive board , was press ing CIA to saturate
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the Cuban airwaves and smuggle or airdrop transistor
radios into Cuba to expand the audience Inside the
Agency FitzGerald politely rejected the congressional
advice but pointed out that WH Division already was
planning the University of the Air," which would
broadcast college - level courses to divide the loyalty
30 9_
of Cuban students
Another congressional critic was Senator
Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn .) , perennial sponsor of bills
to create a_
CIA Watchdog Committee and author of a
January 1964 Saturdey Evening Post article entitled
"The CIA Is Getting Out Of Hand . Wv In April 1965
FitzGerald and Seymour Bolten of WH Division met
with the Senator to discuss the Christian Democratic
social and political programs of the Catholic Church
in Latin America. After this mee
ting McCarthy ,
a
devout Catholic, considerably tempered his assess -
310/
ment of the_Agency
US relations with Cuba entered a new phase
after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when Agency
* This project was abandoned following press expo -
sure of CIA S relations with Ame rican universities
and student groups
284
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facilities provided the Kennedy administration with
pos itive information on
the buildup of Soviet mis -
sile capability on the island _ This episode is docu -
mented elsewhere and is outs ide' the s cope of this
present paper
One of FitzGerald' s major successes' against
Cuba was in the field of economic warfare --called
the MHVIPER program in CIA After a hurricane
ripped through the island in 196 4 , Castro' s econo-
mists and publicists began a campaign to persuade
free-world sugar brokers that the Cuban sugar crop
had been badly damaged and exports would be low _
The object , of course , was to drive up sugar
prices
L
bard dlcuroeio heins Einance Yiapo Ca Castro depended for
At first the campaign worked and sugar prices
did skyrocket. But FitzGerald was not convinced,
and sent Natalie Scott to London to study economic
reports from the British Embassy in Havana . Partly
on the' basis of her research , the US Government! s
sugar-crop forecasters concluded that despite the
hurricane Cuba would harvest more sugar than ever.
FitzGerald arranged to have a- Department of
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State official leak this general conclusion to the
New York Times: Sugar ces dipped, but rallied
when Castro indignantly denied the Times story .
The Department then officially announced the US Govern -
ment estimate that there would be n0 shortage of
Cuban sugar. As it turned out , the US estimate was
right.
After the official announ cement world sugar
prices dropped several cents per pound , and this
time they stayed down _ At a time when fluctuations
of one cent a pound meant millions of dollars to
the Cuban economy
9
publication of the essentially
L
Iateeth the ntkato_Eet Castro 's attempts to manipu -
Late in the summer of 1964. the DDI told Fitz-
Gerald that the . Department of State was inquiring
informally about the possibility of setting up a
CIA channel for plausibly deniable clandestine con-
tacts with Cuba.
FitzGerald replied:
It seems to me that the establishment
of a continuous two-way conversation with
Fidel Castro at a time when we have noth-
to convey to him would_ be a serious
mistake It may - be that Secretary Rusk
feels that the present establishment of
conversations with Fide1 Castro should
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be considered in order to make sure that
we will have the ability
to speak to him
when or if the time comes On this score I do not feel there is any reason for worry .
There are a number of ways in which we can
communicate to Fide1 Castro virtually
at a
moment ' s notice 312_
Part of CIA:' s economic warfare against Cuba
involved an elaborate scheme to supply tampered pet-
roleum additives through an Agency mechanism in An -
twerp _ This was planned
as subtle sabotage ; after
mixed with Soviet petroleum the additives would
7
Gfortuhat ypeche Z6.y_
docto,edcaoaftiyta Crbee;"acyining:
but subtle and the Cubans promptly discovered
313/
were unus able
Als0 a: failure was an attempt Francis S .
Sherry and William C. BoneT , Jr.
9
of the Cuban Oper-
ations Group (WH/ COG) to persuade Detroit automobile
executives to produce spare parts: deliberately de -
signed to break down _ Sherry and Boner went to De -
troit in early March 1965 and explained to manufac-
turing vice presidents that the defective parts
could be sent to Cuba through third-country suppliers _
But_ the automobile executives refused to cooperate;
feared that their companies reputations would
287
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being
ly ,
they
by
they
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be ruined if the doctored parts accidentally got in-
314
to the wrong channe ls
In the wake of the ill-fated Bay of inz
vasion of 1961 and the active years of 1962-1964 ,
anti-Castro operations began to diminish in 1965 .
Operations continued but at a s lower pace _ John L:
Hart had the title of Deputy Chief , WH Division, for
1
Cibh Cocrho/ Jutond?,
)
andmpperated cdai]2 8afahousa; in Miami
)
training sites and boat-moorages stretched through
the Florida keys to West. From these CIA
launched maritime operations which regularly placed
and retrieved agents from the Cuban coast , but whose
intelligence product often did not justify the
315/
effort.
Meanwhile CIA ran a
dwindling number of
on-island intelligence agents , including some
handled in cooperation with the US Navy base at
Guantanamo , where hundreds vf, Cubans still worked
by and returned to Castroland at night _ As
the Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI)
improved and expanded under Soviet tutelage , CIA
agent networks were rolled up and even singleton
1
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agents dropped out of contact_ Typical was Radio
Habana ' s 12 1965 announcement that "31 counter-
revolutionaries
>
members of a CIA espionage network"
had been arrested. Of the 14 actually naned in the
broadcast , WH Division identified six who had worked
with Juan Bautista Perez Luis (AMTAUP - 10) , chief
gardener at the naval base and principal agent for
CIA_ Although he had been debriefed in Miami in Jan -
uary Perez' location and status were not known in
316/
Probably the most successful political oper-
ation in WH Division ' s history was the Chilean elec-
[
the CfistSen 4 Sap Beboct1964 Parky rxhiGaciduvcdy defeated
Salvador Allende Marxist leader of a Communist -
dominated coalition_ * Dr awing on covert mechanisms
established by Santiago Station Years earlier, plus
new procedures and assets deve loped for the election
the campaign to assure Frei' s victory cost CIA about
$2 ,600 ,0 00 . Its success kept Allende at until
1970 , when no such intervention by CIA was authorized.
* For a full description, See "The Chile an Election
Operation of 1964 , a Case History , 1961-1964 .' 11
CSHP-l -
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May _
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that FitzGerald had won the President' s confidence
in several meetings Freeman
9
who had been in Mexico
only a few months apparently simmered down after his
318/
talk with the assistant secretary
The Mexico City Station devoted a major part
of its time to running or supporting operations
against Cuba; 47 percent of its cab le traffic con-
cerned Cuban operations Mexico was the only Latin
American country maintaining diplomatic relations
with Castro and had the only direct air link to Ha -
vana WH Division assigned top priority to recruit-
agents in place in Cuba , and Mexico City Station
not ran its own operations but supported the
tentative plans of other stations
The variety and volume of technical operations
created a heavy workload managing safehouses
)
listen-
ing posts , and vehicles - For photography_ alone the
station had six base houses comman ding the entrances
to target embassies two mobile photosurveillance
trucks and three agents trained in photosurveillance
on foot. It was such projects that provided informa -
tion on the visits of Lee Harvey .Oswald
9
President
Kennedy ' $ assassin , to the Cuban and Soviet Embassies
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319
in Mexico
;
CIA' s clandestine information on
Oswald , in-
cluding
a
photograph showing him in front of the
Soviet Embassy , was turned over to the FBI which
promised to safeguard Agency sources and me thods
Instead , the Bureau showed the photograph to Oswald' s
mother in Dallas and told her it was a_
CIA photo.
The mother gave the press a garbled story about the
photo, the FBI gave the press the correct story ,
and eventually CIA' s clandestine information became
part of the voluminous Warren Commission report on
the Kennedy assassination _ In the process Mexico
City Station had to abandon its photosurveillance
320
base houses _ which had been thorough ly blown
In the early 1960 ' s WH Division built an ex-
tensive political polling mechanism around the Insti-
L
tute [ofoietac E the Cohoge PojeGt GrypEoFpixis ] JNIUBAens =
From 1962 to 1966 the institute conducted 20 polls
in nine Latin American countries _ Their cost cannot
be computed because many of the expenses were charged
to other projects _
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In FY 1965 , for example , tical polls in
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poli