Page 158 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 158 of 237

CAPTAIN CLARK: I thought it was terrible. Everybody in town who had any interest in it knew who they
were ... their cover was so shallow that it was very easily seen through.

MR. SOURWINE: Now, do you have knowledge of an occasion when all of the CIA people at the embassy
were at a single party?

CAPTAlN CLARK: One time down there I was invited to a party ... this Cuban doctor who had operated
on one of my kids was giving it ... He had almost the entire CIA staff at his home for a party one night, and
I was about the only non-CIA man there and he knew that they were all CIA and worked with them as
such.

***

Two years earlier, on August 30, 1960, the former Ambassador to Cuba, Earl E. T. Smith, testified before the
same committee that "the chief of the CIA section" in the American Embassy in Havana was pro-Castro and
that "the Number 2 CIA man in the embassy" had encouraged a revolt of Cuban naval officers in Cienfuegos in
September, 1957.

"In the trial of the naval officers," Smith testified, "it came out that the Number 2 man had said that if the
revolution was successful, that the United States would recognize the revolutionaries. I do not believe that the
Number 2 man in the CIA intended to convey that thought. His story to me was that he had been called over to
interview some men believed to be doctors, because they were dressed in white coats, and when they advised him
of the revolt that was to take place, they wanted to know what the position of the United States would be.

" And he inadvertently intimated something to the effect of which I am not quite sure, that the United States might
give recognition."

Smith testified he repeated all this to Batista. The American ambassador's efforts to explain to the Cuban
dictator that the Number 2 CIA man in the embassy could not tell the difference between a Navy uniform
and a medical white coat must have made fascinating listening.

Normally, the CIA men in the embassies are listed in the State Department Biographic Register as
"attaches," "Foreign Service officers" or, frequently, as "Foreign Service reserve officers."

For example, Henry Pleasants, widely known as the CIA mission chief in Bonn, West Germany, was listed in the
1963 Biographic Register as an "attache," with "S-1" rank, meaning the highest category of Foreign Service staff
officer.

Frank Wisner, the former CIA deputy director for plans, who ran the Guatemalan operation in 1954, was listed as
an "attache" and an "R-1" (Foreign Service reserve officer) after he was sent to London as station chief on August
6, 1959. The 1963 Biographic Register lists "govt. ser. 48-59" for Wisner, to account for the period prior to his
London assignment.

Similarly, Robert Kendall Davis, the Guatemala mission chief who set up the Bay of Pigs training camps, was
listed as an "attache" and later as "first secretary" of the embassy. He, too, was carried on the State Department's
rolls as a Foreign Service reserve officer.