Secret Mission to Rescue 3 Undercover CIA Agents

 

Bad Teeth was the lead interrogator, he spoke English the best. He also had noticeable cavities, hence David’s secret nickname for him. Several times the three prisoners were dragged from their stifling, tiny cells in the bowels of G2, the Cuban intelligence agency and taken to a small room where Bad Teeth and other interrogators repeatedly questioned them. From the start, the mission had been a risky idea and this outcome was the worst case scenario. 

In August 1960, three technicians from the CIA’s Technical Services Division- David Christ, Thornton Anderson, and Walter Szuminski-were sent to Havana, Cuba, to install surveillance equipment in the future Chinese embassy. The year before, Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries had ousted the country’s American-backed military dictator Fulgencio Batista. 

US and Cuban relations were very tense and there was growing influence from the Sovet Union and China with Cuba. Hence the “need” for the US to bug the Chinese embassy. Upon arriving in Havana, the plan changed to installing listening devices in the apartment of a CIA asset who lived above the soon to open New China News Agency. 

Secret Mission to Rescue 3 Undercover CIA Agents

 Just before midnight on September 14th, 1960the three CIA agents were installing hidden microphones, when Cuban authorities burst into the apartment. They were searched and then herded into the back bedroom where they were forced to remain silent. The Cubans laid in wait to ambush, in case anyone else was coming. As the night dragged on, the captors became bored. 

One policeman accidentally shot himself in the hand while playing with his service issued revolver. The next day the three agents were moved to the prison at G-2. Each time they were interrogated they stuck to the same flimsy cover story. They were tourists. While visiting Havana they had been asked by an embassy employee to do a little electrical work for him. 

Meanwhile back at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, John Mertz, the man tasked with extracting the captured agents was sweating bullets. David shouldn’t have been out in the field. He had recently been promoted to be in charge of the field techs who planted bugs. There was some grumbling that he was just a desk jockey. 

Therefore David had leapt at the chance to go on a mission and bolster his rep. The problem was he had top secret clearance and extensive knowledge of Agency bugging operations worldwide. Even worse, not long before his disastrous mission, David had been briefed on the planned invasion of Cuba. The plans hadn’t yet been finalized, but if he broke under interrogation, Castro’s forces would be fully prepared for one of the CIA’s largest-ever covert operations. 

The three agents had gone to Cuba with shall owcover identities, just US passports and drivers’ licenses with fake names. The first thing John did was to quickly shore up their identities, including falsifying records. Thankfully, between the background of the false identities and the Cubans being poor at interrogating, none of the 3 prisoners broke. 

The Cuban authorities came to believe that the men really were tourists that were duped into espionage by American embassy personnel. After nearly a month in G-2, the three were transferred to La Cabaña, an old Spanish fortress turned prison. The men tried to keep up a strong mindset, however they could often hear the rat-at-tat-tat of gunfire as other prisoners were executed on the grounds not far from their cells. 

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On December 18th, 1960, the Cuban government held the agents’ trial. The American Consul, Hugh Kessler made an appearance as their representative. Surprisingly the prosecution did not demand a death sentence as the men expected, but rather 30-year prison terms. While awaiting sentencing after the trial, Hugh was upbeat, telling the prisoners that they’d done great jobs on the stand. He left that afternoon promising to see the mon the next visitation day. 

But a few days later the United States with drew diplomatic recognition of the Cuban government and closed their embassy. The prisoners were cut off from counsel and were ultimately sentenced to 10-year prison terms for “activities against the security of the Cuban state”. On January 23, 1961 David, Thornton and Walter along with 24 other prisoners were sent to the Presidium Modelo on the Isle of Pines, south of the main island of Cuba. 

This prison complex was a panopticon, originally constructed in the 1920s. Five circular buildings each held hundreds of cells, with no cell doors to keep the prisoners confined within. On the main floor in the exact center of the common area was an enormous watchtower with dark tinted windows. 

Guards entered and exited through a subterranean tunnel so the prisoners never saw them, and never knew exactly when the guards were looking at them. The first thing the new prisoners noticed upon arrival was the smell, a fetid stench of thousands of unwashed bodies living in poor conditions. The prison was meant to house 2,500, but was badly overcrowded with some 4,000 prisoners. 

Secret Mission to Rescue 3 Undercover CIA Agents

The second thing was the noise. The prison had a persistent din. Men yelled, threw bottles and banged on metal buckets. The new prisoners were forced into a single file line and marched inside. Then they were stripped naked, their meager possessions confiscated and given ratty prison uniforms. Luckily, the three agents were able to get two adjoining cells inside Circular Four, so they stayed together for the duration of their sentences. 

Back at Langley, John was brainstorming on how to get the agents freed. The prison was heavily guarded, so going in guns blazing was a bad idea. Besides, an armed rescue might alert the Cubans to the fact that they had a valuable prisoner in their custody. John reached out to a contact of his, a federal drug cop who had myriad connections. 

His contact got in touch with the mafia, saying that the CIA was willing to pay $1 million dollars (about 8.7 million in today’s money)if the mob could rescue the prisoners. The wise guys liked the money, but refused. Castro had chased the mob out of Cuba and they had no pull. At the prison, David, Thornton and Walter were under incredible stress. 

Not only were they in a small group of Americans among thousands of Cubans, they spoke limited Spanish. Riots and fights were frequent. Often a fight would set off a chain reaction of altercations. Most of the time, the guards turned a blind eye to the fights and would just collect the severely injured and dead afterwards. Suicides were common as a prisoner could easily jump to their death over the railing at any time. 

Infection and sickness was common due to the unsanitary conditions. The men’s Spanish-language skills improved quickly since there wasn’t much else to do. They began to teach other prisoners English. They even gave lectures on the US Constitution, capitalism, and other facets of American life. Ironically, they ended up acting as agents of influence against the Castro regime from within the walls of its harshest prison. 

One night in April 1961, the prisoners were awakened by the sound of anti-aircraft fire. The prison shook as several American B-26bombers swooped low overhead. David, Thornton and Walter secretly cheered. They knew an American invasion would free them. But no liberators arrived. A few days later through the prison grapevine they learned that the CIA led invasion at the Bay of Pigs had failed. After the attempted invasion, Castro was angry and also fearful of future takeover attempts. 

Secret Mission to Rescue 3 Undercover CIA Agents

The location of the failed invasion suggested that the Isle of Pines might even have been one of the invaders’ planned targets. If the Americans had been able to free the prisoners, Castro would have been driven out. Castro decided to implement a cruel preventive measure. He ordered that the Presidium Modelo be rigged with explosives, so if “necessary” the entire facility could be destroyed and all the prisoners killed with the push of a plunger. 

Suddenly workers showed up at the prison and spent several days using jackhammers to cut holes in the support pillars of each building. They also ran a buried conduit far away to a point outside the perimeter fence, well out of the blast zone. Many prisoners were in denial about what was going on, but when military cargo trucks began delivering crates marked TNT, it could no longer be denied that the prison was being wired to blow up. 

A former Cuban Air Force officer turned political prisoner, Captain Miro recruited prisoners with various skills in his tower, including the three Americans, hoping to find a solution. At first David was worried that helping might blow their covers, but the potential for death if the bombs exploded trumped his identity being found out. 

The group realized that they would have to figure out how to disable the explosives without leaving any telltale indicators of tampering. Also, anything they did would be common knowledge throughout the prison within hours. The men had to trust that the other prisoners understood that they were all in this together, and that no one would snitch. Exploration revealed that in the first-floor lavatory there was a small drain pipe that led into the utility tunnel. 

From there they could access the buried explosives. As a bonus, guards went out of their way to avoid the putrid toilets, so it wasn’t often that someone was in there. Captain Miro tasked two prisoners Manolo and Biscayino with widening the hole from five inches (12.5 cm) to at least foot wide (30.5cm). They used improvised hammers and chisels to chip away at the concrete behind the toilet. The typical noise of the prison disguised their work. Once the hole was bigger, one of the smallest prisoners, a street smart kid nicknamed “Americano” was enlisted. 

At noon, while the guards ate lunch, there was a 15 minute window they wouldn’t be around. Taking advantage of this time gap, American oslipped through the hole and found himself in a large, dim utility tunnel. He tiptoed through the tunnel and took mental notes of what he observed. Large concrete support columns had narrow holes drilled into and were wired together like telephone poles. Americano felt around inside one of the holes in the concrete until his fingers found a putty-like substance. Americano reported his findings to the crew. 

It wasn’t good. The next day Americano went exploring in the utility tunnel again. This time he was tasked with bringing back samples of anything he could find. Americano returned with a primer cord, blasting caps, a five-kg block of TNT, he had found lying in a corner. The soldiers had rigged the dynamite with some sort of failsafe detonation system. An electrical line ran to thousands of pounds of explosives through dedicated channels drilled into the concrete columns. 

Worse, there was a second channel with high-grade primer cord — a kind of high-speed fuse ignited with a blasting cap. If the electrical detonation system malfunctioned or was tampered with, the primer cord could be ignited from a shed a half-mile from the prison. Both systems would need to be sabotaged to stop a potential bombing without the guards realizing that sabotage had occurred from within the prison. 

What’s more, the prisoners had limited tools to disable the explosives with; razors, knives, sewing kits and whatever they could improvise. While David worked on creating a sabotage plan, Walter worked on a plan for what to do in case they disabled the bombs, and the guards tried to trigger them and realized what had happened. They would have mere minutes from the time the bombs were triggered until the guards realized the sabotage. 

They would have to make a frontal assault on the main perimeter gate to have any chance of a mass escape. On subsequent trips to the tunnel, American stole several blocks of malleable TNT and blasting caps. Walter and some other prisoners made improvised hand grenades using empty tin cans, rocks, and nails. 

Crude timer fuses were fashioned from IV tubing from the infirmary and ground-up match heads. A prisoner who had been the chief chemist for the Bacardi rum company figured out how to distill alcohol from fermented fruit scraps and made Molotov cocktails. Because of the open design of the prison, the men worked in their cells in full view of the central guard tower. 

They worked in shifts and just hid their assembly efforts simply by turning their backs to the tower. David devised a method to short the electrical wire by cutting the insulation, twisting the wires into an X-shape, then shoving the insulation back down over the twist, thereby concealing the break from cursory examination. He also came up with a method to use a sewing's pool to block the tunnel once the primer cord was cut, therefore maintaining tension in the line. 

Once the sabotage was worked out Americano had to be trained to perform the actual work. Mimicking the dark, cramped conditions he’d be working under, Americano practiced defusing the bombs by lying on his stomach, completely covered by a blanket to block out all available light. He went through the complex procedures over and over until they ran out of stolen materials to train with. 

One night, an hour before the final prisoner count of the night, Americano slipped into the utility tunnel and confidently sabotaged the bombs, minutes later he was back, mission complete. After Americano’s success in Circular 4,detailed instructions were passed through the prison grapevine to the prisoners in the other towers. Within several days word came back from each Circular; the explosives in all five buildings had been successfully defused. 

Secret Mission to Rescue 3 Undercover CIA Agents

From the beginning Wilma Christ had pushed the CIA for info about her husband David and the other 2 captive agents. Upset about the run around she was getting from the CIA’s Office of Security, she went around normal protocol and contacted officials she had met socially. Eventually, her tenacity paid off and the CIA facilitated a meeting between her and U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Wilma was told about a plan to send a U.S. delegation to Cuba. 

The objective was negotiations to free the1,100 rebels captured during the Bay of Pigs invasion. At her insistence, Wilma was able to meet with the leader of the delegation, James Donovan, a prominent lawyer who previously negotiated the exchange of a captured Soviet spy for a downed American U2 pilot. He was sympathetic to Wilma’s pleas to get her husband free. Over many months, John made several trips to Cuba to hold face-to-face conversations with Castro. 

Ultimately, an agreement was made that Cuba would release the 1,113 prisoners from the Bay of Pigs and allow their families to depart Cuba with them--9,703 people in total. Also Cuba would release 37 additional American citizens including David, Thornton and Walter. In exchange, Cuba would receive $2.9 million raised by private companies and charitable organizations; $53 million worth of medicine and baby food for the Cuban people; the release of 4 Cuban prisoners and 17,500 tons of surplus food from the US Department of Agriculture. 

One day in March of 1963 guards called out the names of several Americans including David, Thornton and Walter. They were ordered to the courtyard. David thought they were going to be executed, but instead the prisoners were marched outside of the complex. After 2 and a half years of imprisonment, the 3 agents were free. 

After flying to Miami, intelligence officers hustled the three agents away from the waiting cameras. They were subjected to interrogation and made to endure multiple polygraph tests. The CIA was very concerned that the three may have been brainwashed and were now double agents. They thought there was no way they maintained flimsy covers for two-and-a-half years under such circumstances. However, eventually Thorton and Walter returned to regular operational duty. 

David was reassigned to a desk job at the Directorate of Science and Technology, far away from field operations. Some 16 years later, as some of the secrecy around the ordeal lessened, the three men were awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Cross, the CIA’s highest decoration for their overall courage, strong morale under miserable conditions and extraordinary risk taking to help save the lives of their fellow inmates. USA’s CIA vs Russia’s FSB - Who has the Most Elite Spy Agency? Find out here: Ever wonder how prisoners of war survive? Learn some tips here: