Page 176 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 176 of 237

THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT -- A GRAY OPERATION

Outside the high garden wall of the decaying villa in Miramar, on the outskirts of Havana, guards armed with
Tommy guns patrolled back and forth.

Inside, James Donovan, the remarkable, soft-spoken New York attorney, picked up the telephone and asked the
Cuban operator to put him through to a number in the United States.

He took out a black wallet, of the type that was large enough for foreign bills, and reached into an apparently
empty pouch. From a concealed pocket in the wallet he pulled out a typewritten sheet of onionskin paper.

On it, down the left-hand side, were key words like "negotiations." On the right side were various phrases such as
"1 am meeting with" and then a list of various people, including the name "Fidel." The sheet also contained what
appeared to be a list of stocks.

By ordering his "broker" to "sell Quaker City" and by using other innocuous key words, Donovan, through his
code sheet, was able to convey to the CIA men on the line in the United States the real progress of his
negotiations to ransom the lives of more than 1,000 prisoners.

James Donovan was on his most important mission. He was playing for high stakes -- the freedom of the 1,113
survivors of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The men were captives in the jails of Fidel Castro.

Donovan was a silver-haired, forty-six-year-old former OSS man, short but powerfully built. In February, 1962,
on the bridge in Berlin, he had traded the Soviet master spy Rudolf Abel (whom he defended five years earlier in
Federal Court) for the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and Yale student Frederic L. Pryor, held on a charge of
espionage by the East Germans. It was the most spectacular spy swap in the history of the Cold War.

Donovan's Cuban adventure began a few months later, early in June, 1962, when Attorney General Robert
Kennedy sent to him a delegation of Cubans made up of survivors of the Bay of Pigs brigade and their families.

Up to that time, sixty prisoners had been ransomed for a pledge of cash, but efforts to free the rest had failed in
June, 1961, when negotiations between Castro and a Tractors for Freedom Committee collapsed. The committee,
sponsored by the Kennedy Administration, had been unable to reach agreement with Castro on the dictator's
continually shifting offers to trade the prisoners for 500 tractors or bulldozers.

Donovan, after listening to the pleas of his visitors, agreed to become the general counsel to the group. It was
called the Cuban Families Committee for Liberation of Prisoners of War, Inc., a charitable corporation that had
been granted tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service.

On August 29, 1962, Donovan went to Cuba for his first talks with Castro. He stayed at the crumbling villa in
Miramar and conferred with Castro at the Presidential Palace in Havana. He made it clear he would offer drugs
and baby foods for the men, but no cash or tractors. Castro agreed to negotiate on this basis, provided the Cuban
Families Committee came up with the $2,900,000 it had pledged in return for the sixty prisoners released the
previous April.

Donovan returned to New York and visited John E. McKeen, the president of Charles Pfizer Company, who lived
in the penthouse of Donovan's apartment building near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. They called in John T. Connor,