Page 207 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 207 of 237

THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT -- CIA'S GUANO PARADISE

"There are three coconut palm trees on Great Swan Island at the present time," the State Department brochure
discouragingly told Americans who inquired about retiring to an island paradise in the Caribbean. "There are no
poisonous snakes, but the islands are infested with hordes of lizards ranging in size from only an inch to over
three feet."

The vision of thirty-six-inch lizards slithering underfoot would likely deter any potential visitor who had written
to the State Department for travel information about the little-known Swan Islands, which, on the map, beckon
attractively as a speck in the western Caribbean near Honduras.

But the department's brochure, prepared for just such inquiries, had even more hideously disenchanting news. "It
has been necessary," it said, "to construct the few houses on the island on piers and to take other steps to keep the
lizards from overrunning them."

The water, the brochure added, "is exceptionally clear and blue and abounding in different types of fish. Ocean
bathing is considered dangerous as a constant watch must be kept for shark and barracuda."

The State Department's disheartening travel folder might, just possibly, have been prompted by the fact that Great
Swan Island, as late as 1964. was the site of a covert CIA radio station broadcasting to Cuba, Mexico, Central
America and the northern tier of South America.

Not that any prospective tourist would have been likely to stumble on the island. There is, naturally, no
commercial airline service to the CIA's airstrip. The only boat takes five days to ply between Tampa and the
island and carries a pungent cargo of bananas and fertilizer.* And normally anyone visiting the island must have a
secret clearance.

Despite these precautions, the story of the bedeviled efforts to conceal the CIA's hand on Swan Island provides an
episode of comic relief.

The Swan Islands are really two islands, Great Swan (usually known simply as Swan Island), which is a mile and
a half long and half a mile wide, and Little Swan. There is also a reef, called Bobby Cay. The islands are due
south of the western tip of Cuba, and ninety-seven miles north of Punte Patuca, Honduras. They are said to have
been named for a seventeenth-century pirate who used them as a base.

Like the lair of Ian Fleming's nefarious Doctor No, the CIA's Caribbean isle is made entirely of guano, the
accumulated droppings of sea fowl. The United States has claimed the islands since 1863, but then, so has
Honduras.

When the CIA received approval to mount the operation against Cuba that grew into the Bay of Pigs, it was
decided first to soften up Castro's island psychologically by means of radio broadcasts.

By 1960 Radio Swan was on the air. Initially, its mission was confined to propaganda broadcasts designed to
undermine the Castro regime. Gradually, as the Bay of Pigs invasion planning progressed, the radio station was
assigned a more militant role. During the invasion, as has been seen, Radio Swan broadcast coded messages,
appeals for uprisings among the Cuban populace and armed forces, and instructions in the art of sabotage. But
back in May of 1960, there had to be some public explanation for the mysterious new fifty-kilowatt station that
suddenly began to broadcast from Swan Island.