Ghosts of Havana (Judd Ryker #3)(45)




music, baseball, biotech sugar.


It was a pitiful list. Sugar might even be too contentious. Judd changed it:


biotech sugar tropical agriculture.


Still pathetic. But at least it was something to propose. The topic was beside the point, he reminded himself. It could be anything. He just needed to manufacture a new reason to talk to the Cubans. Any cover for making a deal to recover the Americans.

Were they hostages? Or ploys? Or pawns? The uncertainty burned at him. Judd turned back to his whiteboard, staring at the photos of the four men. What were they really doing in the Florida Straits? Why was Landon Parker so anxious to help them? What was their connection to Ruben Sandoval? And who was Richard Green?

Who the hell were these people?





40.


CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

THURSDAY, 10:42 P.M.

Sunday dug deeper into the CIA archives on the Bay of Pigs. Most of the records on Brigada Asalto 2506 had been redacted or were so old that they had been boxed up and taken to off-site storage, probably some warehouse in a nondescript office park off a northern Virginia parkway. There was no way he’d get to the original records tonight.

The CIA had increasingly been relying on “open source intelligence,” what government officials called any material that was also available publicly. Crucial nuggets of information could often be found in newspapers or on websites that were just as reliable as clandestine sources. Sometimes open source was even better.

So far, Sunday had confirmed from open sources that Brigada Asalto 2506 had, in fact, been a group of Cuban exiles that formed the core team of a covert paramilitary CIA operation to invade Cuba in 1961. The plan, hatched by the Agency’s Deputy Director of Operations at the time, Randolph Nye, was to have 2506 land at Bahía de Cochinos and establish a beachhead. They would then make contact with a local underground force, inciting a popular counterrevolution and eventually retaking power in Havana. Assassinating the Cuban leader was not a formal objective of the plot, but all members of 2506 knew that wealthy Cuban exiles in Miami had placed a large bounty on the head of El Jefe.

Sunday read in the historical records that President John F. Kennedy had approved the Bay of Pigs operation, but so much had gone wrong that day. The element of surprise was lost after invasion plans leaked. The Bay of Pigs was supposed to be one of America’s most covert operations, but it was spoken about openly in the cafés and bodegas of Little Havana in Miami.

On the fateful day of the operation, Brigada Asalto 2506 attacked a well-armed Cuban force and quickly ran out of ammunition and supplies. The first-wave teams on the beach were trapped and outnumbered. The underground counterrevolutionary cells were also neutralized before they could activate. The promised cash never arrived.

In the end, more than a hundred men from Brigada Asalto 2506 were killed and more than a thousand were captured. The detainees were then publicly paraded back in Havana, a humiliation that was only worsened by a show trial the following year. The leaders of 2506 were executed, while the rest were given lengthy prison sentences. Most of the men were eventually released in a prisoner exchange in late 1962. They returned to Miami, longing for home, seething with hatred for the communists, and burned by the betrayal of the U.S. government.

Sunday found several historians who concluded that Nye’s plan was doomed from the start not by operational mistakes but rather by a flawed premise of popular support. Few academics believed that the Cuban public was ready at that time to support an American-backed invasion.

But among the exiles in Miami, Sunday learned, that one factor rose above all else as the reason for the debacle: Kennedy’s denial of Nye’s request for U.S. air support. The planes never came.

Fascinating, Sunday thought to himself. But what do Randolph Nye and Brigada Asalto 2506 have to do with today? How is this ancient history possibly connected to the Americans captured on The Big Pig?

Sunday kept digging. He learned that after the Bay of Pigs failure, Nye resigned, moved to a ranch in Texas, and quietly disappeared from political life. Sunday unearthed his brief 1991 obituary in the Waco Tribune-Herald, which noted his lifelong service to the United States government but made no mention of the CIA or of Cuba. Sunday also found a photo of Randolph Nye in the 1932 archives of the Yale Daily News, but he was wearing a football helmet so his face was hidden. The only other picture of Nye that Sunday could find was in a long-defunct Spanish-language newspaper of South Florida, La Gloria. The grainy photo from February 1961 showed several men around a table at a restaurant. The caption read Líder local Héctor Cabrera se reúne con Randolph Nye del gobierno federal.

The name Cabrera lit up on the page like a neon sign. Sunday double-checked his notes and, yes, one of the hostages, the owner of the boat, was Alejandro Cabrera. Sunday quickly searched the open source database for Héctor Cabrera and found an obituary in the Miami Herald from 1979:


Héctor Cabrera, a beloved figure in Little Havana . . . Born in Santa Cruz del Norte, Cuba . . . A successful diamond dealer . . . Moved to Miami in 1959 . . . Cuban patriot active in local politics and charitable organizations . . . a champion for democracy and human rights in his homeland . . . Survived by his grandsons, Alejandro Cabrera and Ricardo Cabrera . . . Donations can be made to the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana . . .


Sunday sat back in his chair to absorb what he had just read. The captured American, Alejandro Cabrera, was the grandson of a Cuban exile linked to the architect of the Bay of Pigs. A coincidence? Or did a young Alejandro listen to the war stories of his grandfather and was somehow seeking to redeem his family’s past? Could the seizure of the fishing boat be yet another mistake in a long line of ill-advised covert operations by exiles against the Cuban government? Or by the Central Intelligence Agency? Or, most likely, was Sunday inferring conspiratorial connections that didn’t really exist?

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