Free The Berlin Conspiracy by Tom Gabbay

killed, the rest were captured.
    Kennedy managed, after eighteen months, to buy their freedom with $53 million in food, medicine, farm equipment, and other goodies prohibited by the new trade embargo. A State Department spokesman described it as “a goodwill gesture to the people of Cuba” and Castro called it “war reparations.” If anybody had asked me I’d have said it was a good old-fashioned shakedown, but nobody asked.
    Anyway, Kennedy had invited all the Cubans in Miami to the Orange Bowl one afternoon a few days after Christmas so he could take credit and try to make peace. You had to give him points for guts because he wouldn’t be facing a particularly affectionate crowd down there—the Cuban exile community had expected to have Havana’s roulette wheels spinning again by now and the fact that Castro was still taunting them with four-hour speeches didn’t really endear the young president to them. And it was a fair bet that the returning vets themselves had less than warm and fuzzy feelings for him. In their minds the U.S. government—and the White House in particular—had pretty thoroughly fucked them over.
    In truth, it was hard to disagree with them. Of course, “truth” when it came to Cuba was like light through a prism—it depended entirely on your angle, and there were a hell of lot of angles in that island gem. But I understoodmore than most why the Cubans felt betrayed. I was there when they were handed “The Big Lie.”
    I’d been pretty heavily involved in the Cuba Project during the buildup to the invasion, running a disinformation campaign and launching special ops out of Happy Valley, the World War II airfield on the coast of Nicaragua that was being used as the main staging area. But it wasn’t until the second week of April 1961—a few days before the attack was scheduled—that I got my first look at the Cubans who were going to hit the beach. They were flown in from Guatemala, where they’d spent the last eighteen months in the jungle, being trained by agency-run Green Berets. As I watched them file off the C-54 transport planes I thought they looked young, intense, and, it seemed to me, pretty anxious. Of course, they had reason to be. Castro had a whole army waiting for them.
    The commanding officer at Happy Valley was a Marine colonel named Robert “Rip” Harkin, a hulking six-foot-four-inch former All-American quarterback from Oklahoma who’d been one of the soldiers to plant the original Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima, two days before it was re-created for the famous photo. But he was just on loan from the Pentagon. The guy actually running the show was Henry E. Fisher.
    Henry was credited with conceiving the plan that overthrew the Guatemalan government in 1953. Not that it was much of a plan—a couple of dozen lightly armed farm boys were sent to shoot up a couple of villages while Henry and his crew broadcast radio reports that an army of thousands was on its way to the capital. They buzzed the presidential palace a couple of times with an unarmed warplane and the entire government fled the country. It gave Henry a lot ofcredibility at Langley, and after a stint as chief of station in Uruguay, he was made top field agent in the Cuba Task Force.
    A tall, lanky New Englander in his early forties, he had a receding hairline, a bulbous nose, thin lips that seemed incapable of an honest smile, and a serious disposition that you could mistake for dignity if you didn’t know better. He was known as a clever, resourceful operative, but I had my doubts. Castro wasn’t gonna surrender based on radio reports.
    On the day before the landing, Colonel Harkin summoned the brigade commanders to a final briefing. I went along uninvited and took a place at the front table beside Henry. The Cubans sat facing us in several rows of vintage school desks, eyes glued to Harkin, who stood at a blackboard running down the logistics of the invasion. He went into great detail about landings,