Page 208 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 208 of 237

And so it was that something called the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation, then of 437 Fifth Avenue, New York,
announced publicly that it had leased land on Swan Island to operate a radio station. (Officials of the line said that
the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation had not owned a steamship for ten years.)

Horton H. Heath, who described himself as "commercial manager" of the station, explained that Radio Swan
would broadcast music, soap operas and news. "It is strictly a commercial venture," he announced to the press.
"We plan to get advertisers. We haven't got any yet, but are negotiating."

But who owned Gibraltar Steamship?

Walter G. Lohr, of Baltimore, who said he was a stockholder, identified the president of Gibraltar as
Thomas Dudley Cabot, of Weston, Massachusetts, a banker and the former president of the United Fruit
Company, and the director, in 1951, of the State Department Office of International Security Affairs.
Appropriately, considering his new capacity, Cabot was also president and director of Godfrey L. Cabot,
Inc., the world's largest producer of carbon black.

Another stockholder was publicly identified at the time as Sumner Smith, a Boston businessman who claimed that
his family owned Swan Island. Horton Heath explained that the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation was leasing the
land for the radio station from Sumner Smith, who was chairman of the board of Abington Textile Machinery
Works, 19 Congress Street, Boston.

When a reporter for the Miami Herald reached Smith in Boston in June, 1960, he fended off questions about
Radio Swan by saying: "Speak to the government."

But the government professed ignorance of the radio station. In answer to a question at the time, a State
Department spokesman had replied: "The only station that I know anything about on Swan Island is a United
States Weather Bureau station." (And it was true that the United States had operated such a station on Swan Island
intermittently since 1914.)

The United States Information Agency did go so far as to say it had planned a project similar to Radio Swan but
had abandoned the idea because of "interference and licensing problems."

Peculiarly, the Federal Communications Commission, which is required by law to license all radio stations
operating from United States territory, did not license Radio Swan or the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation.

"We don't know who owns the island," an FCC spokesman explained lamely.

The State Department suffered no such doubts. It firmly listed * Swan Island as a "possession," and had
consistently rejected Honduran claims.

And so Gibraltar Steamship and Radio Swan were in operation. It did not take long for Havana, stung by the
propaganda broadcasts, to bark back. As early as June 21, 1960, Castro's Radio Mambi, in Havana, complained
that "a counterrevolutionary radio station, supported by U.S. dollars, is now active on Swan."

Things were going reasonably smoothly for the CIA, however, until the Hondurans began to get fidgety over the
funny business taking place on what they insisted was their mound of guano.

The trouble had its roots in the fact that a 1960 U.S. census had been taken on Swan Island. In March of that year,
a two-star admiral had been piped ashore to count noses on Great Swan. (Only birds lived on Little Swan). Rear