25

Sept. 28, 1960

From: Charles to Halifax:

Since Hunt left Miami on August 15, he has been making a thoroughgoing attempt to establish the Frente in Mexico City, but is having trouble. The facts, as I receive them from Howard by cable or phone, may be old news to you. But I will proceed on the assumption that I offer a few new items.

The core of the problem is Win Scott. I know Mr. Scott is one of our most esteemed Station Chiefs, but my guess is Howard was off to a built-in bad start once he brought an operation into Mexico City that was not directly under Scott’s jurisdiction. In addition, the Mexican government—again my assessment comes from Howard—is over-impressed with Castro’s potential to stir up the revolutionary sentiments of the populace, so they are offering small welcome to Cuban exile movements. Howard has lost whole working days getting Frente officials through Mexican customs. Moreover, the Mexican authorities keep harassing the newspaper office of Mambí, the Frente’s weekly sheet here. Mambí has been prey to daily persecutions via fire laws, foreign labor restrictions, trash removal fines—the usual.

In the meantime, Howard, who certainly likes his perks, has had to put up with a rent he terms “wholly excessive” for a small furnished house in Lomas de Chapultepec. The cover story he imparts to old social friends is that he has resigned from the Foreign Service because of disagreements with the leftist drift of our policies in Latin America and is now hard at work on a novel. In the course of picking up these bygone relationships, Howard has also managed to recruit an American businessman with old Agency ties to rent a couple of safe houses for us where Howard can meet with the Frente. Under no circumstances, however, are the Cubans allowed to learn where Don Eduardo lives. The separate lives of Don Eduardo and E. Howard Hunt are not permitted to encounter each other. This generates a considerable amount of daily travel. Howard made certain the safe houses were on the other side of the city.

Needless to remark, paranoia has not lessened in the Frente. Distrust of the U.S. abounds. The leaders may be in Mexico at our request, but the body of their movement remains in southern Florida; hence, they claim our concealed motive is to elevate them into figureheads for world opinion, even as we remove them further from the real and future leaders who command the invasion force. Working against this premise, Howard has had his hands full at more than one ugly meeting. For a further complication, Barbaro is not there now. He went back to Miami a month ago on an errand, and the others can talk about little else but Faustino’s failure to return. Hunt has been importuning me to get on Toto’s tail.

Barbaro, when I do see him, swears that he will go back to Mexico as soon as he can get his affairs in order, but is strangely wistful about it. I think he would really like to, but is trapped. Howard is convinced that Barbaro is engaged in a criminal caper involving considerable money. Howard says we need a Miami-based agent to get the goods on Toto, and I have been chasing through stacks of three-by-fives. Sad to relate, the most promising of the candidates, if I can recruit him, is not even a Cuban but a former Uruguayan Communist who used to work for me in Montevideo. I was instrumental in having him flown out to Miami one step ahead of the local cops and his former Party associates. His name is Eusebio “Chevi” Fuertes and he now works in a Miami bank that launders some of our money for the exiles. Barbaro, incidentally, uses the same bank, which fact brought me to consider bringing Fuertes into this.

I must tell you that I hesitate to employ him. I had a reunion with Chevi last night and it gave me pause. He is all but pro-Castro, so if I did not know him well, I would not go near him. In Montevideo, however, he acted in much the same manner, forever deriding the possibility that America, being capitalist, could ever have a decent motive. Yet, no agent was more valuable to us in Uruguay. When it came down to it, he hated the Communists even more than he hated us. Of course, if you have some agent you would prefer, well, so would I.

Incidentally, Fuertes has already provided me with one extraordinary piece of local news. It seems everyone in the Frente, Barbaro most of all, is terrified of a wealthy Cuban millionaire named Mario García Kohly who is a devout Batistiano, considers Castro equal to Satan, and sees the Frente leaders as concealed agents for Castro, and therefore prime subjects for assassination. Kohly has ties with a former Cuban senator named Rolando Masferrer who maintains an army of thugs and killers from the Batista days; they are holed up in a place called No Name Key which Kohly owns. Via Fuertes, I hear that some of our Agency people (certainly unknown to me) have been trying to put together a private invasion army for Kohly, and provide him with boats. If successful, it would be a disaster, I think, since such an adventure would produce a civil war. (Of course, I may be seeing too small a part of the picture.) Fuertes, whose instinct for gossip impresses me as salient, adds that the deepest rumors in the exile community assert that Kohly’s support comes from the White House. Not the top, but awfully close to it.

I must say that with Hunt gone, I have been so busy that I did not expect this letter to prove as enjoyable as it did. I persist in hoping that some of my stuff has stance for you.

One looks forward to your next visit.

Your health,
Harry