Page 182 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 182 of 237

Nevertheless, Donovan succeeded and the prisoners' lives were saved. As an unexpected part of the deal,
Donovan persuaded Castro not to let the Red Cross ships sail away empty. Castro began releasing thousands of
refugees previously unable to leave Cuba, including over 5,000 members of the families of the prisoners.

Then in March and April of 1963 Donovan won the release of more than thirty Americans held in Cuban jails,
including three CIA men. On July 3, when the last of the medical supplies reached Cuba, the American Red Cross
announced that a total of 9,703 persons (including the Bay of Pigs prisoners and the Americans) had been brought
out of Cuba under the agreements negotiated by Donovan.

The staggering figure of nearly 10,000 persons rescued by one man is not widely known, because the total figure
received less public attention than did the dramatic return of the invasion prisoners.

In all of these missions, Donovan had the assistance of, and worked hand in hand with, the United States
Government. But he was not formally a part of it. In each case, as a private citizen, he was breaking new ground
in a form of intelligence diplomacy that is a unique outgrowth of the Cold War.

In the case of the Powers-Abel swap, the negotiations that culminated on the Berlin bridge began with a series of
letters to Donovan signed "Hellen Abel" The writer of the letters claimed to be the wife of the Soviet spy
imprisoned in the United States. The letters came from Leipzig, East Germany.

Donovan turned each of them over to Lawrence Houston, the CIA general counsel. The agency prepared an
answer to each letter from "Mrs. Abel," and shipped them back to Donovan in New York, who sent them off to
Leipzig. But when Donovan eventually went to East Berlin to negotiate the final details directly with the Russians
and East Germans, he was technically on his own, a private American citizen with no diplomatic immunity or
protection.

Donovan's missions, then, have defied any neat categorization. President Kennedy, in a letter to Donovan after the
East Berlin mission, characterized them as "unique." Because of their very nature, there was public confusion
over whether he acted as a private citizen or as a secret agent of the United States Government. The truth is that
he was somewhere inbetween.

The government was unwilling to tell the full story of its role in the Cuban prisoner exchange, as it has been
related here, because to have done so during Donovan's negotiations might have handicapped his ability to deal
with Castro. And, afterward, it might have engendered too many delicate political questions. In a very real sense,
the seeds of one covert operation, the Bay of Pigs, had given rise to another -- the return of the invasion brigade.

Those who sought a clear, simple explanation of whether an operation was private or governmental were bound to
be disappointed in the case of James Donovan.

His rescue of the Bay of Pigs prisoners was not precisely a "black, " i.e., secret operation. Nor was it entirely
"white." It might be most accurately described as a mixture of both -- truly a gray operation.

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* The memorandum noted that some drug companies might gain a tax "windfall" by making charitable
contributions to the prisoner exchange deal. An accompanying letter by Oberdorfer to Robert Kennedy pointed
out that the drug companies would nevertheless insist on approval of the deal by someone at least as high as a
Cabinet officer as well as "maximum protection from legislative and public criticism in two particular directions:
(a) charges of pro-Communism and (b) criticism for inferences drawn from any price mark-up exposed in the
transaction."