Ghosts of Covert Pasts: Ricardo "Monkey" Morales
The CIA's Early Anti-Castro Counterinsurgency and the Cuban Origins of an Operation 40 Triple Agent
As I contend in the episode “Ghosts of Covert Pasts (FSU Shooting I)”, the attack that struck the Seminoles campus in Tallahassee on Thursday, Apr. 17th—coincidentally the 64th anniversary of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion—and the accompanying media spectacle appear to feature some of the hallmarks of a “deep event”, a concept coined by Peter Dale Scott and used to denote incidents of “hidden or underappreciated relevance to deep politics.” A handy heuristic for identifying deep events would be that, in almost every instance, they are obscured by a cover story or limited hangout of half-truths. If my assertion that the recent tragedy at Florida State may have been a deep event is eventually proven correct, it would fit into the intermediary tier of Scott’s subcategories, which he terms “mid-level”. The lowest level in Scott’s conception are “crimes with limited intent and importance which is often only dimly understood, even with hindsight”. Examples he gives are the stealing of personal data or falsification of documents. The highest tier in his deep event trifecta consists of “structural deep events”, which are so consequential that they can alter or rupture the very fabric of society (think JFK, MLK, 9/11, Watergate, etc). The Florida State University shooting, if you buy into my logic and if it is borne out, would be a third thing. One of the distinguishing characteristics between the three appears to be the degree of violence involved as well as the notoriety of the participants and victims. As Wikispooks encapsulates the intermediary tier:
Mid-level deep events, such as assassinations, are harder to hide and their wider relevance may be grasped by the astute student of deep politics. Commercially-controlled media is often used to misrepresent the facts in an effort to obscure the event's deep political relevance, and more drastic actions may be employed to handle would-be whistleblowers or those with evidence which could threaten to unmask the truth.
The history of modern mid-level deep events is rife with mass shootings of both the school & non-school varieties: Columbine, Pulse nightclub, Las Vegas, San Bernadino, the 2016 Munich shooting, Parkland, Anders Breivik, etc. This is but a small sample of a surfeit of shootings numbering among a host of bombings and at-first-glance senseless attacks that begin to lock into spine tingling patterns like a perverse jigsaw puzzle upon closer examination. Official narratives involving always damaged, “lonewolf/ lone nut” perpetrators (alleged) fall to pieces when put under the stress of their inherent contradictions: repeated, questionable run-ins with law enforcement; familial ties to intelligence, the feds, the military industrial complex, or armed forces; the mysterious disappearances or unexplained deaths of witnesses and/or alleged accomplices; competing versions; etc.
While I want to avoid regurgitating my rationale for why I think it’s possible the FSU shooting meets some of the criteria for a deep event, such a case largely hinges on the alleged perpetrator’s openly acknowledged law enforcement ties via the Leon County Sheriff’s Office and the fact that one of the only two victims to die from their gunshot wounds was Roberto Morales, the son of infamous CIA operative, cocaine cowboy informant, & anti-Castro explosives expert Ricardo “Monkey” Morales. In keeping with our theme, “Monkey” Morales presciently confessed that his end was nigh shortly before he was murdered in a Key Biscayne club owned by the weed-slinging rival named Juan Cid that he’d threatened to inform on in 1982 (Roben Farzad, Hotel Scarface). When “Monkey” Morales pulled his sons aside at a Floridian shooting range in 1981 and spoke ominously of the death he believed would be imminent, he revealed he’d divulged too much info pertaining to his covert CIA activities to a Venezuelan journalist, thereby jeopardizing his life. Roberto Morales, who succumbed to his wounds after he was shot at FSU two weeks ago, asked his CIA operative father if he had killed JFK. While “Monkey” Morales denied direct responsibility for JFK’s death, he let slip that he had been Lee Harvey Oswald’s sniper instructor at a secret (presumably Operation 40) paramilitary training camp in the Everglades. He also claimed that he and the members of an anti-Castro “clean-up crew” were instructed to travel to Dallas days before 11/22/63. In Ricardo Jr.'s retelling of the interaction, their father told them that they awaited orders in Dallas that never came and then duly returned to Miami. Perhaps the father was shielding the sons from the full truth as he knew reality was just too irradiated and could put their lives at risk. The fact Morales was penning a memoir at the time and was publicly shopping it around probably only served to ratchet up the heat.
Fast forward more than 40 years from Ricardo’s “justifiable” murder (per Miami investigators in a clear dereliction of duty). Deceased FSU victim Roberto Morales has a half-brother named Ricardo Jr., also sired by “Monkey” aka “El Mono”... And all too coincidentally, Ricardo Morales Jr. has also been toiling over a book-length reappraisal of their gunslinging operative and informant father which is slated to publish this September, less than half a year after the FSU shooting. Not to be overly bold with the speculations, but the circumstantial parallels between the deaths of “Monkey” Morales and his son decades later may hint at a targeted hit. Reinforcing this targeting logic would be the fact that the both deceased victims were working in food services in FSU on the day and both men were greying with brown skin (which could theoretically mean that the other deceased victim, named Tiru Chabba, was taken out to obscure the clipping of Roberto Morales or else that, in the case of a second shooter, perhaps there had been some confusion). Furthermore, in a classic case of like father like son, Roberto also professed fears that the many covert vendettas, internecine Cuban exile beefs, and backstabbed dopers that his father’s lead-flying career left in its wake might one day come back to bite him as well, as Ricardo Jr. stated in a podcast interview with his co-author Sean Oliver. How ironic then that the son of a Cuban, supposedly anti-communist paramilitant would end up gunned down in cold blood by the adoptive son of a Leon County deputy, an allegedly white supremacist FSU student who had been overhead by fellow classmates complaining that, “multiculturalism and communism are ruining America”. Either way you cut it, the ghosts of “Monkey” Morales’ covert pasts returned to haunt his next of kin and Roberto’s whole life was scorched by the arc of his father’s quick rise in the CIA-Mafia underworld, his globetrotting path of destruction, and his calamitous fall.
Ricardo Anibal Morales Navarette aka “El Mono / The Monkey”
CIA Cryptonym: AMDESK-1
FBI Informant Codename: MM 553-KS & MM-1550-KS
In order to better size up whether Scott’s conception of the deep event fits the FSU shooting and to weigh whether I think there’s an argument to be made that Roberto was targeted, I’ve taken it upon myself to synopsize the entirety of Monkey Morales’ life and his espionage, illicit, and informing career, calling upon sources as varied as his recently declassified CIA file, a history of the Miami narcotraficante clubhouse known as the Mutiny titled Hotel Scarface, and a cardboard box jammed with books covering various extrajudicial assassination efforts of the era.
Ricardo Anibal Morales Navarrete was born in Havana, Cuba on 14th June, 1939. Just over a year after Ricardo “Monkey” Morales’ birth, the new Cuban Constitution was ratified and Batista defeated Ramón Grau San Martin in the first presidential election under its auspices. “Monkey” Morales was 7 years old and living in Cuba’s largest city when the fabled, Luciano and Lansky orchestrated Havana Conference was adjourned. Over the course of the meet, Lucky resumed his place at the helm of Cosa Nostra following his exile, the Bugsy Siegel hit was set in motion, and the casino action in Cuba was divvied up in a scene evoking Hyman Roth’s Cuba cake cutting on a rooftop terrace patterned after the real-life Hotel Nacional in The Godfather Pt. II.
Several of the upper floors of the Hotel Nacional were sealed off for the weeklong Mafia conclave. Luciano sat at the head of a long conference table with Lansky at his side. Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia, Frank Costello, Joe Bonanno, Vito Genovese; Charlie, Joe, and Rocco Fischetti; Joseph “Doc” Stacher; Carlos Marcello; and Santo Trafficante sat around the table. Stacher recalled, “Everybody brought envelopes of cash for Lucky, and as an exile he was glad to take them. But more important, they came to pay allegiance to him.
Excerpt From: Jack Colhoun. “Gangsterismo.”
As Colhoun writes by way of Alfred McCoy, one of the top priorities in their deliberations was to iron out a plan to turn Cuba into the allied American Mafia & Jewish mob’s primary heroin distribution hub in the Western hemisphere—the casinos they operated would serve as the ideal laundry for all the ill-gotten dope gains.
The Havana Conference met under the cover of a special performance by Ol’ Blue Eyes. Perhaps a young, tousle-haired “Monkey” Morales spied the singer in the street. One can imagine his youthful face, devoid of the death squad worry lines and cocaine mania that marked his older visage, lighting up in a massive grin. Frank Sinatra had already acted as a courier at the conference, checking into the hotel with a false name, a benjamins-laden briefcase in hand, and flanked by the fearsome cousins of Al Capone. He carried the $2 million the crooner was to deliver to Lucky Luciano, cash back payments amounting to Lucky’s stake in various Stateside enterprises that had accumulated while he was locked up.
The cash (Sinatra) had delivered was seed money for one of the most grandiose ventures the American Mob would ever undertake: to establish a base of operations in Cuba that would make it possible for organized crime to function as an international conglomerate. Fulfilling this plan would put the Mob beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement.
According to Joseph “Doc” Stacher, Lansky had already placed Fulgencio Batista in his pocket more than a decade earlier—in fact, 6 years prior to Ricardo “Monkey” Morales’ birth—when he initiated generous payments to the military officer around the time Batista played a pivotal role in the Sergeants’ Revolt in 1933, which resulted in Machado’s ouster and placed Batista on the path to eventual power as he consolidated his influence in the Cuban armed forces. “With a handshake and abrazo” (Colhoun, Gangsterismo, Ch. 2), Lansky and Batista closed a molasses deal that included the promise of the Mob’s gambling and tourism monopoly on the island nation in return for routine bribes, lustrating Cuba as Lansky’s personal Promised Land with the ritual of one hand washing the other. The coup and the collaboration between the strongman and mobster set in motion a complex series of events that would lead to the revolution and Castro’s eventual ascension, a world historical rippling out from Havana to Miami, New Orleans, Mexico City, Dallas, DC, Vegas, New York… The Bay of Pigs, Operation 40, Lansdale’s Operation Mongoose, the slapstick comedy of hundreds of failed attempts on Castro’s life, the JFK assassination, the JM/WAVE Station, Watergate, Cubana Flight 455, the cocaine goldrush and Miami as “Paradise Lost” / Murder Capital of the Country, Operation Tick-Talks, the assassination of “Monkey” Morales, Scarface, Iran-Contra and so on. Perhaps even a tragic deep event that terrorized the Spanish moss shrouded campus in Tallahassee nearly 80 years later. When one maps the movements of “Monkey” Morales and the Operation 40 Cuban exiles with which he associated, they are tracing the history of CIA-sanctioned wetwork and the Agency’s deadliest unethical activities in the Western Hemisphere, which were offloaded to “autonomous” cells like the anti-Castro terror organizations Morales would later inform on so as to obscure the who, the what, and why.
Ricardo Anibal Morales Navarette was 14 years old when the Movimiento 26 de Julio was initiated with the Castro-spearheaded assault on the Moncada Barracks, an inciting moment in the Cuban Revolution. Perhaps the mercurial Morales even became a “true” anti-Batistite believer for a time, a short-lived ideological flirtation invigorated by his teenaged abandon and existence in a historical moment of such consequence and intrigue. Or perhaps… And this is a secondary theory that we will consider more closely later on and which I find less likely at present… Perhaps “Monkey” Morales was a stalwart, unbreakable, deep cover servant of the Cuban Revolution, even up until his demise. And perhaps the deaths of himself and his son 40ish years later are the proof of old scores getting settled. We’ll see which interpretation of his early alignment with Castro proves convincing (if any) with time.
Morales was all of 17 years of age when the Granma yacht ran aground in the mangrove swamp at Playa Los Coloradas and the Castro Brothers, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and a thinned band of revolutionaries regrouped in the verdant Sierra Maestra after Batista’s forces picked off nearly 3/4s of the landing party. On New Year’s Eve, 1958, Morales would have presumably been on holiday from his law studies and in the springtime of his adulthood as news reached Havana that Castro had successfully seized Santa Clara days earlier and Camilo Cienfuegos rang in the New Year with a successful assault on Yaguajay. Cubans set off bottle rockets and paraded in the streets as Batista announced his flight from the inflamed country at a NYE gala as immortalized in mob lore by The Godfather Pt. II. I’m referencing the scene anchored by the kiss of death that Michael Corleone plants on the cheek of his panicked brother Fredo after he ascertains his betrayal, of course, an allusion to Judas’ identification of Jesus in Gethsemane and an un-Christlike inversion of Jesus turning the other cheek. Per some accounts, Batista absconded from Cuba with $300-400 million that ended up deposited in Swiss bank accounts. Lansky, meanwhile, scrambled to round up as much cash from the various Mafia-operated casinos as possible before Castro and the triumphant guerillas reached the city limits (Colhoun, Gangsterismo, Ch. 4).
According to Spartacus Educational, “Monkey” Morales was initially a supporter of Fidel Castro. Although there appears to be a relative dearth of information regarding his activities in Cuba on the cusp of the Castro government, perhaps he too joined in the proletarian joie de vivre in Havana. To expand this picture, I’ll quote from Roben Farzad’s Hotel Scarface.
In 1959, when Fidel Castro wrested control of Cuba, he nationalized the resorts and had their slot machines smashed in the streets. During the ensuing purge, Ricardo Morales, a twenty-year-old law school student, signed up for Castro’s secret police…
Morales quickly grew disenchanted with the secret police and wanted out of Castro’s Cuba. He might also have been flipped by the CIA, which had assets on the ground in Havana, just as Fidel Castro had moles up in Miami.
This pivotal time in Morales’ life and his final years in Havana spanned the CIA Cuba station’s stewardship switching from William Caldwell (who may have been slightly more Castro sympathetic, likely at the behest of the CIA and perhaps even the Mob who still erroneously believed they could reason with and influence Fidel) to James A. Noel and deputy station chief Arthur Avignon, who appear to have replaced the outgoing Caldwell in 1959/60. Odds are decent that during the revolutionary period and early days of the Castro government, the timespan when “Monkey” Morales was likely turned, he came into contact with Frank Sturgis (Fiorini), the future Watergate burglar and one time gunrunner implicated in the JFK assassination. While not necessarily the most reliable character, a honeypot that Sturgis ran named Marita Lorenz would later claim that Sturgis, Cuban Power terrorist Orlando Bosch, Guillermo Novo, and Pedro Diaz Lanz traveled to Dallas together days before the assassination in an interview with the New York Daily News—she also alleged to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) that Sturgis was one of the men who fired on Kennedy. All four of the men she listed are confirmed members of Operation 40 who served in the paramilitary with Ricardo “Monkey” Morales. Let’s see if we can triangulate when / where Morales and Sturgis may have encountered each other in Cuba… Maybe we will get so far as geolocating a building, if we’re lucky.
A veteran of the Marines in the WWII Pacific Theater, Sturgis showed up on the scene in Cuba as the anti-Batista insurgency began to coalesce in 1956, supposedly not making contact with the CIA until 1958 per the documentary record, although he surely was already serving the interests of American intelligence in Latin America in an off-the-books, proxy capacity upon his arrival. Sturgis was deposed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. In the interview, he claimed that he first met Castro & Carlos Prio in the US, possibly as early as 1956 (likely during the period when Fidel, in exile following his imprisonment by Batista, traveled to the States in search of wealthy benefactors to finance the revolution, surveilled by Cuban intel all the while). In the lead up to the revolution, Sturgis ran guns to Castro and the other factions of the anti-Batistite guerillas.
On 30th July, 1958, Sturgis was arrested for illegal possession of arms. However, he was released without charge.
Sturgis set up an underground network of assets for Castro stateside but fed the names of the agents and all other pertinent details to American military attaché Col. Nichols and the FBI. All the while, he furnished the CIA with intelligence & identified prospective recruits, despite his reservations about how the Agency were, akin to the Mob, playing both sides during the latter stages of Castro’s uprising.
The lack of textual evidence linking Sturgis to the CIA prior to ‘58 was probably intentional, as it seems clear Sturgis was infiltrating the Cuban Revolution on assignment. While it may be self-hagiographic or an attempt at whitewashing his image, Sturgis claimed that he declined payment for his service to the CIA during said deposition, instead doing it out of loyalty to his country. If factual, this clearly indicates that Sturgis was being remunerated by various Agency proxies and capitalists like Jose Maria Bosch Lamarque of Bacardi Rum for plausible deniability reasons (Bosch was but one of the various financiers of the covert raids on Cuban airspace, waterspace, and beachheads that Sturgis helped plan and implement). There’s a chance it also runs counter to a mercenary character on Sturgis’ account.
Once Castro came into power, Sturgis was pointman on smoothing over relations between the Mafia and the Castro government and lobbying for a new status quo that would enable Lansky, Trafficante, Giancana, et al to hold onto their Cuban casino monopoly. For a time, he was even Castro’s favorite Yankee—Fidel briefly appointed him as a supervisor and inspector of casinos. As a go-between between Castro and the Mafia, Sturgis notified Santo Trafficante and Hymie Levine that he would be shuttering all gambling dens for 10 days on the government’s behalf in advance. Sturgis even once interceded to save the Jewish mobster Stretch Rubin from a group of Barbudos or Bearded Men, a colloquial phrase to describe Castro’s guerillas.
There is (also) some evidence that in 1959 Sturgis had contact with Lewis McWillie, the manager of the Tropicana Casino. After Fidel Castro gained control of Cuba, Sturgis formed the Anti-Communist Brigade. In his book, Counter-Revolutionary Agent, Hans Tanner claims that the organization was "being financed by dispossessed hotel and gambling owners" who operated under Fulgencio Batista.
Following Batista’s abdication on NYE 1958, Sturgis started working with Pedro Diaz Lanz, Commander-in-Chief of the Cuban Air Force, who appointed Frank its Head of Security. In this capacity, the avowed anticommunist Sturgis hatched a plan to topple Castro using a squadron of Batistite Air Force Police commandos with whom he hoped to “seize Camp Columbia, the nerve center of the (Cuban) armed forces” (Warren Hinckle & William Turner, & William Turner, Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of JFK, pp. 51 - 53). As we will discover, this was presumably one component of a larger, multifaceted counterrevolution designed by the CIA in occasional collusion with Mafia interests that incorporated the earliest Fidel assassination schemes, the infiltration of the revolutionary Cuban forces by American double agents, the recruitment of future Operation 40 assassins, and sundry anti-Castro propaganda efforts, largely overseen by contract agent David Atlee Phillips in tandem with Sturgis-associated “White House Plumber” E. Howard Hunt (codename “Eduardo”), who would be heavily involved in JM/WAVE activities and was in and out of Cuba at the time, serving as a case officer for various Cuban assets. Efforts to subvert the revolution had been well under way for years by the time the Bay of Pigs rolled around.
As Sturgis germinated his “Camp Columbia” plan, he was running at least two other assets of varying stripes: the German citizen “honeypot” Marita Lorenz, who was in the midst of a torrid affair with Castro, and Fidel’s secretary Dr. Juan Orta. The scheme, it should be noted, bears passing resemblance to the King memorandum, which advocated the seizure by force of a “controlled area within Cuba” from which a long wave propaganda radio station could broadcast over the entirety of the island while also serving as a rallying point for the opposition in a manner akin to the 26th of July’s utilization of the Sierra Maestra in the Oriente Province. Ultimately, this initial Operation 40-esque plot and predecessor to the Bay of Pigs invasion was thwarted when Sturgis and Pedro Diaz Lanz (also OP40) were burnt, given up to Raúl Castro and Cuban intelligence, possibly by the CIA itself, although it’s just as likely that this was a deliberate obfuscation so as to shield sensitive operations or elements of the anti-Castro underground.
Sturgis fled Cuba on June 30th, 1959, after Cpt. Sergio Sanjenís of the Army intelligence tipped him and Lanz off to the encircling noose. Coincidentally, Sergio Sanjenís was the cousin of José Sanjenís Perdomo aka Joaquín Sanjenís aka Sam Genis aka San Genis, the Cuban exile of many names who would become eventual resident director of the death squad known as Operation 40, the elite tier of the Brigade 2506 paramilitary. Much later on, Sam Genis also happened to be working as the doorman at the Dakota on the night that likely mind controlled assassin/patsy Mark David Chapman “gunned down” John Lennon. Prior to his enmeshment in the anti-Castro / CIA / Mob underworld, Joaquín Sanjenís had worked as a Cuban police officer; thus, there’s conceivably a chance that he knew Ricardo “Monkey” Morales prior to Castro taking control or during Morales’ brief career as a G-2 secret police officer. Sanjenís, as we will henceforth refer to him, continued to have a curious, reciprocal handler/handlee relationship with Frank Sturgis, with numerous references in the literature referring to one handling the other and vice versa on multiple occasions.
Shortly following his rapid departure from the country in June ‘59, Sturgis arranged an escape route for his seductress asset Lorenz, whom he’d first met in the Lansky-constructed Hotel Riviera and who knew Johnny Rosselli directly. She would next return to the island on an assignment to poison Castro, a joint CIA-Mob effort assisted by Roselli on behalf of Sam Giancana and orchestrated by Frank Sturgis, who provided Lorenz with CIA-issued poison capsules delivered by MKULTRA chemist Sidney Gottlieb, which Lorenz infamously concealed in a jar of cold cream. When she discovered the capsules had dissolved in the cream, she gave up the charade and told the truth about the operation under gentle interrogation by Fidel. According to legend, Castro took out his revolver and presented it to her, giving Lorenz a chance to finish the job, but so persuasive were his powers of counterseduction that Lorenz emptied the chamber of bullets and chose to make love to him instead (Thomas Maier, Mafia Spies, Ch. 13 “Lie Detectors). The solubility of gel capsules in dairy was the mechanism by which this iteration of the multiple Sturgis-helmed Fidel Castro assassination attempts was foiled.
Taking Sturgis’ activities in Cuba and his ties to the Sanjenís cousins into account, it seems probable that Sturgis encountered Ricardo “Monkey” Morales prior to his defection or even helped scout him on behalf of the CIA, as he admitted in his deposition that he was IDing attractive exile talent for the agency. What is undeniable is that both men would serve within the elite unit of the multifaceted anti-Castro paramilitary known as Operation 40 headed by Sanjenís, which “Monkey” appears to have remained in league with up until the mid-’60s. Not to preempt this too much, but Morales may have complicated his relationship with the Agency in 1963 when he impulsively “regaled the Miami Herald with the story of how he and nine fellow exiles in two fast boats nearly destroyed a refinery on the coast of Cuba” (Farzad, Hotel Scarface). This mission may have been one of the over 100 anti-Castro raids that Sturgis helped to organize. Morales’ loose lips (he would maintain a relationship with the Herald for decades) and another fascinating anecdote regarding his attempts to ferret out info about JM/WAVE programs that we’ll return to later nearly had him hitting the skids. He was saved from total wilderness of mirrors ignominy when he was recruited by Angleton and deployed to the Congo as part of WIPEGASUS, a counterintelligence mission we’ll also return to later (WI being the digraph denoting Congo).
But in order to preliminarily illustrate some of the prevailing overlaps between Sturgis and Morales’ careers by narrowing the scope from the whole milieu of Operation 40 in which they both were members to a few examples, Sturgis had considerable ties to multiple operatives with whom “Monkey” Morales’ life intersected in fascinating, duplicitous, and possibly deadly ways, including:
Orlando Bosch (Operation 40), who “Monkey” allegedly aided and armed over the course of multiple Cuban Power, anti-Castro bomb plots including Cubana Flight 455 and the Orlando Letelier car bombing before seemingly backstabbing Bosch by informing against him and Luis Posada for the feds, although he and Bosch’s paths apparently crossed again in Venezuela, so the true nature of the game is unclear
Rafael Villaverde (Operation 40), the Cuban exile charitable bigwig running the show in Little Havana who “Monkey” ratted out to Miami Police during Operation Tick-Talks, which led to the imprisonments of Rafael and his fellow Bay of Pigs veteran brother Raul on conspiracy to distribute cocaine (by way of Bolivia’s military despots) charges. Per a Jim Hougan interview with Frank Terpil, Tick-Talks (its namesake was a bugged clock) implicated 50 more anti-Castro Cubans besides and also pointed a finger at Ted Shackley, Richard Secord, etc. Much more on Tick-Talks and its possible place in a motivational history of Morales’ assassination later on. Shortly before “Monkey” turned against them, the Villaverde Brothers had traveled to D.C. to offer their testimonies against ex-CIA man Edwin P. Wilson, which might have some explanatory power… Speaking of which…
Edwin P. Wilson (Operation 40), a reported friend of “Monkey” Morales, the ex-CIA arms trader who had landed in hot water when he attempted to recruit the help of the Villaverde Brothers in assassinating either Carlos the Jackal or else a Libyan dissident on behalf of Col. Muammar Gaddafi (certainly persona non grata in the West, thus the desire to prosecute Wilson, though I personally have to do further sifting to get a grip on this story).
With friends and enemies like these, how shocking that Morales would meet a premature end. As mentioned, Frank Sturgis was closely affiliated with the above sample of Morales’ acquaintances and more besides. Brief aside, but in the 1970s, partial architect of the anti-Castro effort Richard Nixon, Cuban-American Operation 40 veteran/ Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, and Frank Sturgis all owned properties or worked in Key Biscayne. How coincidental that “Monkey” Morales would end up sprawled out across a barroom floor with a slug planted in the back of his skull in said village (which is sequestered on a barrier island reached via the Rickenbacker Causeway out of Miami for those unaware).
In December 1959, as “Monkey” Morales served within the Cuban Dirección de Inteligencia (aka G-2), perhaps already as a mole or else in the process of being groomed as an asset by the CIA, the shadowy Col. J. C. King, a lesser known Central Intelligence functionary, sent the now-infamous, previously mentioned memo that proposed for the very first time that the CIA ought to consider assassinating Castro in writing. You can download a redacted copy of the King memo here.
Listeners of PPM may find it fascinating to know that, prior to his appointment as Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, Joseph Caldwell King served as a VP of Johnson & Johnson, overseeing their business concerns in Brazil and Argentina. This in turn led Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs to draft King’s services during war time to aid in the counter propaganda efforts against the Axis in South America. As a military attaché stationed in Argentina, King fed duplicitous intel to the Japanese. Besides advising Dulles to “eliminate” Castro in the memorandum that kicked off the non-paper trail to Operation 40, King…
…scoured the rainforest on behalf of his Amazon Natural Drug Company, collecting samples of poisons and hallucinogenic flora and fauna used by Indian hunters and shamans which might have a profitable application in the medical, pharmaceutical or agricultural industries. Secretly, he remained in the pay of the CIA, who received his specimens for their MK-ULTRA mind-control experiments.
In the 1960s, King aided CIA-orchestrated counterinsurgency against the indigenous peasants of the Revolutionary Left Movement resisting industrial incursions in Peru and served as pointman during the Agency-backed coup of Brazilian leftwing president João Goulart to prevent him from nationalizing the country’s mineral deposits. King’s condor-like carnage of the Peruvian political situation served Standard Oil interests, as he cleared the way for their arrival. This clearly illustrates that one of the first articulators of the percolating and palpable desire to off Castro, which spanned the disparate Yankee, Cowboy, and Mob worlds—this man who authored the memo that would manifest the death squads and paramilitaries taking “Monkey” Morales halfway around the world—would find service in the anticommunist counterinsurgency efforts leading up to Operacion Condor, during which various OP40 Cuban exile assets would also be repurposed, sailing their proverbial dread ship to new ports of call following the Bay of Pigs and Brigade 2506’s failure to find berth.
Returning to the primary focus of this series, let’s take an initial look at the Mary Ferrell Foundation’s chronology of the AMDESK-1 cryptonym, which was used in CIA documents in reference to Ricardo “Monkey” Morales:
104-10071-10235: In early 1960, Morales was a member of the DIER (Department of Investigations of the Revolutionary Army) - Cuban army intelligence.
Furthermore, when we examine the Betsy Palmer authored 1978 File Review of Ricardo Anibal Morales Navarette on behalf of the DDP Division (Document #: 180-10143-10345), we see that Morales claimed during a 1964 polygraph test during his formal recruitment by the CIA for paramilitary activities that he hadn’t communicated with “Cuban security or intelligence since September 1960”:
While this is a hugely incomplete account of “Monkey” Morales’ CIA activities, it is worth enclosing and examining this Mary Ferrell Foundation transcription of the Agency’s “Draft Cable Bio” of Morales, as it illustrates the Company’s routine recalcitrance when furnishing information and systemized practice of covering their documentary tracks. We will show in just a moment that, contrary to the Bio’s claim, “Monkey” Morales had been recruited at least 4-5 years prior to his “January 1964 recruitment” for WIPEGASUS.
104-10177-10230: DRAFT CABLE BIO OF RICARDO MORALES NAVARETTE.
Undated chrono summary, 1960-1972: Draft cable to London (Info: Caracas): Slugline WNINTEL RYBAT KMSTONE MHSPIKE: REF: CARACAS 31409, (IN 097618):
"1. Ricardo Morales Navarette (201-0285923) was born 14 June 1939 in Havana, Cuba. In October 1960 he took refuge in the Brazilian Embassy in Havana and on 29 November 1960 he entered the U. S. at Miami as a Cuban refugee. He is self-admitted former G-2 agent. Morales was first spotted and recruited in Miami in January 1964 to be used as a radio operator and member of paramilitary infiltration team. He was successfully polygraphed on 10 February 1964. He was paid a salary of $200 per month effective 1 May 1964. He was terminated on 26 August 1964 and was never used in a BKHERALD (CIA) sponsored mission. He had received training in Miami, as well as ISOMETRIC and MKCOSMOS. He volunteered and signed up for a paramilitary action in the Congo in September 1964. Although he received training toward the Congo mission, he never served. Morales was apparently turned over to the FBI in 1968 by Miami Station. In October 1972, BNDD (DEA predecessor) registered Morales with Miami Station as their source. 2. The following may be passed to JAGUAR (MI-5) if Station London believes would be of interest..."
There are multiple fibs in the above Morales bio: contrary to the CIA’s claim, Morales had been used in BKHERALD-sponsored missions and did in fact serve in the Congo mission, as we shall see. Additional proof of his Congo chapter can be found in the bullet wound that Morales took to the back which nicked his spine. Regardless, this document is useful as it helps us iron out the chronology of Morales’ defection to the US. According to the above sources, Morales continued to serve as a G-2 agent up until September 1960. The Brazilian Embassy granted him safe haven in October of that same year, at which point he hid out awaiting approval to travel to Miami. He entered the country on November 29th, 1960.
When I first began drafting this article cum episode, I had an inkling of when Ricardo “Monkey” Morales was first recruited by the CIA, but hadn’t confirmed it. If you listened to the first “Ghosts of Covert Pasts” with friend of the show Isaac Eger, you know that one of my lines of questioning hinted at my suspicion that Morales was acting as a mole for CIA handlers while still employed by Castro’s secret police force. Turns out this hunch was on the money, as I’ve managed to confirm via an interview conducted by Quebecois-Cuban journo Jean-Guy Allard with Gen. Fabian Escalante (former chief of Cuban intelligence), which was initially published in Granma:
Escalante remembers that in 1959 a "very strong" CIA center existed in Cuba with several case officers based in Havana. Among them (were) two very important figures: David Sanchez Morales, registered as a diplomat with the U.S. embassy, and David Atlee Phillips, who (had been) doing business in Cuba since 1957.
"Phillips had a press agency, David Phillips Associates, which had offices on Humbolt St., behind the Rampa theater. We had information from a person who was his personal secretary at the time and he was using the Berlitz Academy, where he would meet with people he wanted to recruit. The Berlitz Academy was not his business, but he had recruited its director and that's why he was using it to train his agents.”
"And at that time he recruits Antonio Veciana, Juan Manuel Salvat, Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Isidro Borjas, a person of Mexican origin, to carry out the internal counterrevolution."
Phillips will train illegal cadres while (presumably David Sanchez) Morales, on his part, directs a group of North Americans who (have) infiltrated the Rebel Army: Frank Sturgis, Gerry Hemming, William Morgan.
"When the revolution triumphs these people are officers in the Rebel Army, many of them in the air force because the chief there is Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz, who was the first chief of the rebel air force and who later leaves the country when an assassination attempt against Fidel fails. He will also direct Howard Hunt, who is visiting Cuba in '59 and '60 and who will write a far-fetched chronicle about Havana which is a series of lies. Hunt is a professional liar.”
Now that we know that CIA contract officer David Atlee Phillips (alias Maurice Bishop) recruited and trained Ricardo “Monkey” Morales for “internal counterrevolution” service at the Berlitz Language School in Havana, we can flesh out a sense of the comings and goings at Berlitz via David Kaiser’s The Road to Dallas and the imprisonment of Drexel Gibson, owner and operator of the school, who arrived in Cuba in June of 1958. Gibson secured a license to use the method from the Berlitz Schools of Languages of America, Inc., dated December 1st, 1958, right around the time that individuals like David Atlee Phillips and others from the CIA pressured dictator Fulgencio Batista to face the music made by the increasingly changing and overwhelming tide of the conflict with Castro and step down before getting strung up in the Habana streets…
The CIA was aware of at least one other plot at the time. In 1960 Antonio Veciana was a young Cuban accountant for banker Julio Lobo, who had joined Manuel Ray’s MRP. Veciana told the Church Committee in 1976 that in the spring of 1960 he was recruited by an American businessman with a Belgian passport named Maurice Bishop, who approached him after hearing about his disillusionment with Castro, possibly from his boss, Lobo. Bishop, whom Veciana believed to be a Texan, turned him over to a man named Melton for classes in organization and sabotage in a building that also housed a Berlitz language school. Melton gave him the names of three contacts at the U.S. Embassy: Colonel Sam Kail, who appears to have been an Army intelligence agent, Ewing Smith, and Vice-Consul Joe Acosta. In late 1960 Veciana began planning the assassination of Fidel Castro. (Kaiser, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, pp. 70 - 72)
Antonio Veciana would go on to found infamous anti-Castro paramilitary Alpha 66, which David Atlee Phillips would funnel $253,000 in financial support to under the pseudonymous Belgian moniker Maurice Bishop as Veciana’s handler, funding plans to assassinate Fidel and attack Soviet ships docked in a Cuban harbor in 1963. Phillips had a dress rehearsal for his major role in the Cuban show to call upon, of course, when planning the counterrevolution against Castro, first in Cuba and then out of the Embassy in Mexico and the JM/WAVE station: he and E. Howard Hunt had previously collaborated on propaganda efforts against the Jacobo Árbenz government during the CIA-sanctioned efforts to depose the Guatemalan agrarian reformer, who the Guatemalan ruling class and the United Fruit Company found unpalatable. Phillips and Hunt helped orchestrate a leaflet drop of thousands of anti-Árbenz pamphlets out of an aircraft on June 18th, 1954, a scheme bearing striking resemblance to OP40 members Frank Sturgis and Pedro Diaz Lanz leaflet drop over Cuba in 1959. Phillips and Hunt also jointly oversaw the CIA’s Voice of Liberation radio station that beamed out threats matching the unsubtle rhetoric of the leaflets, which were followed by a bombing campaign of ports and army installations to drive the point home. Phillips and Hunt would continue their working relationship in Havana and later out of the JM/WAVE station. Finally, it should be noted that Julio Lobo was considered the single most powerful sugar broker in the world up until he went into exile in 1960.
To review, David Atlee Phillips had recruited Berlitz School owner Drexel Gibson so that he could use the academy as a CIA front. In classrooms adjacent to the language school’s offices, Phillips as Maurice Bishop had implemented a curriculum of counterrevolution organizing and sabotage training, some of which were delivered by a man named Melton. Melton was the alias of James Joseph O’Mailia (cryptonym: AMCRACKLE-1 ; pseudonym: Gordon Biniaris). It’s noteworthy that, while he was conducting the training of future Cuban OP40 assassins in the classrooms above the Berlitz Language School CIA front, Melton was heavily involved in an operation with the cryptonym AMPALM:
Described as the MDC/MRR complex circa 1960. An early effort, aided by (the) CIA, to develop an organized anti-Castro united political front. The MDC, also known as the Christian Democrats… One of the major elements of the original JMARC (overall Cuban operations, including the Bay of Pigs project) program was to develop an organized exile political front which could ultimately be declared a legitimate government in exile. Note that when Oswald's New Orleans nemesis Carlos Bringuier came from Argentina to the USA in 1961, he identified himself as a member of the "MDC in exile".
If it isn’t already clear, this was a preliminary effort to coalesce a political body that could step into the void created by the “elimination” of Fidel and his deputies Che and Raúl (as detailed in the King memo)—Operation 40 was to be the nascent intelligence service for whichever government would ultimately succeed Castro and their role would be to set about carrying out reprisal killings and purges of Castro holdouts and interrogate anyone tied to the revolutionary government. We can find a more detailed account of the CIA trainings being held at Berlitz via the Mary Ferrell Foundation again:
180-10147-10240: ANTI-CASTRO ACTIVITIES AND ORGANIZATIONS AND LHO IN NEW ORLEANS
1961: "Once Veciana agreed to work with Bishop on anti-Castro activity, he was put into a 'training program'. Veciana described this as a 'two to three week program' which consisted of nightly lectures. He was the only one in the program, which was conducted by a man he knew only as 'Mr. Melton'. The lectures were held in an office in a building which Veciana could recall were being held on El Vedado, a commercial thoroughfare. He also remembered the building housed the offices of a mining company 'with an American name', and, on the first floor, a branch of the Berlitz School of Languages..."
Antonio Veciana, who would also go on to become a member of Operation 40 and founder of Alpha 66, was handled by his case officer out of the Berlitz school at the same time that G-2 mole Ricardo “Monkey” Morales was receiving guidance and direction in the first half of 1960. Veciana, this former accountant for Lobo, began to conceive of various Castro assassination plots, the initial iteration in May of 1960 and another in the fall, over a year before Operation Mongoose would receive the official greenlight in November of 1961. While I haven’t confirmed it, it’s well within the realm of possibility that Ricardo “Monkey” Morales was even enlisted to help in the first plot, as his time as a CIA double agent in G-2 wouldn’t draw to a close until September 1960. An aside, but you can refer to the cited section of Kaiser’s text and Spartacus Educational for a more thorough explanation of how all evidence seems to indicate that Phillips was using the aforementioned “Maurice Bishop” Belgian cold body (also note that the cover identity was Belgian, which is interesting considering Morales later deployment to fight Congolese freedom fighters with Belgian commandos). Quoting from The Road to Dallas again:
In 1976 he (Veciana) helped draw a sketch of Bishop that bore a remarkable resemblance to David Atlee Phillips, a long-time CIA operative who was indeed in Havana as a contract agent from 1958 through most of 1960 and who then became one of the directors of the Bay of Pigs project and associated propaganda activities. Veciana dropped his biggest bombshell when he told the Church Committee that he saw Lee Harvey Oswald meeting with Bishop in Dallas in the late summer of 1963. Cuban intelligence services concluded independently that Bishop was Phillips and Gaeton Fonzi, the Church Committee and HSCA investigator who worked with Veciana, has since stated that Veciana identified Phillips as Bishop off the record, although he declined to do so under questioning by the committee. During the HSCA investigation, a JMWAVE case officer named Ross Crozier, when asked for the identity of any CIA officer who used the name “Bishop,” replied spontaneously after a couple of days of thought that David Atlee Phillips used the name Maurice Bishop. All evidence, in short, suggests that Maurice Bishop and David Phillips were the same man.
Phillips was working in Havana under contract while running a public relations firm, and this may have given him more freedom than usual to operate independently of the CIA. Agency records contain no indication that Phillips or any other CIA officer recruited Veciana in 1959–60. Richard Helms, however, acknowledged in his memoirs that the agency recruited many Cubans for the Bay of Pigs without going through customary checks. In 1975, another extremely informative CIA officer, Sam Halpern, told the Church Committee that operational branches would not necessarily reveal a covert relationship to an agent in response to a security check in any case but would merely send over biographical information in their files.
One CIA cable definitely confirms much of Veciana’s story. On December 12, 1960, he called on the Havana Embassy, along with another man who also claimed to be working with the MRP. “No station traces,” cabled the Havana CIA, confirming that there was no record of Veciana’s recruitment. Veciana spoke to “Olien,” which may be a cryptonym for the military attaché Colonel Kail. He claimed to have developed a plan to kill Castro and his top associates—a scheme known only to two men outside Cuba and a handful inside. One of those on the outside was presumably Bishop, with whom he later claimed to have discussed it. He wanted U.S. visas for the families of the four men involved, and four M-1 rifles with grenade adapters. Veciana said that he spoke previously with an unidentified embassy political officer, which that officer subsequently confirmed, and gave Lobo as a reference. In reply, headquarters confirmed that Lobo thought highly of Veciana but added, “In any case [this from director] agree Havana should not in any way encourage radical schemes of this kind particularly when presented in this cold approach manner. Accordingly prefer no action on visas.”
Headquarters apparently, by this time, had developed a policy of refusing unsolicited offers to assassinate Castro to avoid being entrapped, while mounting its own attempts. Veciana was forced to abort one planned assassination in May, and most of his network was arrested before another one could be attempted in November. Among those arrested that month was Amador Odio, a wealthy landowner on whose es- tate some conspirators had taken refuge and whose daughter, Silvia—already a refugee—found Lee Harvey Oswald standing at her front door in the fall of 1963. Veciana himself managed to escape to the United States and told the Miami press that the assassination plan failed when a bazooka misfired.
One of the consequences of the activities being run through the Berlitz building is that, in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs failure, both Gibson and Berlitz CIA instructor Melton aka O’Mailia were arrested during the Castro-sanctioned roundup of thousands of Cubans and Americans:
Drexel Gibson (note: who ran the Berlitz school in Havana) was among the hundreds of thousands of Cubans and Americans arrested on 19 April 1961 as Castro's forces were finishing off the exile invasion force at the Bay of Pigs. Also arrested that day was James Joseph O'Mailia, an American professor teaching English at the University of Villanueva. O'Mailia was released three months later and, along with 87 other Americans, was flown to the US on a US State Department plane. Upon disembarking, the reporters waiting for the plane honed in on O'Mailia for an interview. His comments about the arrests and releases in Cuba appeared in newspapers across America… (John Newman, Into the Storm, pp. 87 - 88)
Fascinatingly, the Cuban government seems to have been under the impression that Gibson was working for the FBI, as referenced in a memorandum sent to W. C. Sullivan by S. B. Donahoe (a document that I’ve been trying but so far have failed to find an unredacted copy of)—his FBI work is seemingly factual as hinted at by the document, which the Company did a poor job of redacting, as Bureau files show that “during World War II Gibson served with Civil Intelligence Section of Panama Canal Zone and maintained friendly liaison with FBI representative in Panama”.
This has led me to believe that David Atlee Phillips may have recruited Gibson specifically so as to obfuscate the CIA front in the Berlitz campus by creating the appearance that he was operating in early Castro Cuba on the Bureau’s behalf, a pretty brilliant gambit. This picture appears to have been deepened, perhaps deliberately in an effort to create a paper trail and feed disinfo to G-2, by Drexel Gibson’s report to the FBI that he was growing concerned by the number of instructors that he employed who had ties to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), which Lee Harvey Oswald would of course work to infiltrate in Cuba and New Orleans and which played a pivotal role in the JFK coverup as it helped to create the deceptive appearance that “Oswald assassinated Kennedy” (scare quotes to denote that this isn’t true, if it isn’t obvious) on Castro’s behalf, as the Company / anti-Castro / Mafia co-conspirators intended. There is a direct connection from Gibson to one of the primary seeders of that piece of disinformation that we’ll illustrate in just a second.
Gibson reported to the Bureau on FPCC and alleged Castro-sympathizing Americans Harold Spencer and Berlitz Cuba employees Martha McCurdy, Iilah Warner, Claudia Beck, Angela Motsis, Rosanna Carfagno, and Christine Olson de Urriutia. Be advised that I do not agree with the above hyperlinked blog post’s conclusions, as the author appears unaware, possibly willfully, of all the clear evidence of CIA activity in the Berlitz academy and Gibson’s ties to Phillips, so tread carefully—that said, it still has useful information pertaining to his imprisonment and FBI ties. When Gibson was detained following the Bay of Pigs, he alleges that the G-2 tortured and interrogated him for over a month, pressing him to reveal the FBI “network” of spies they believed he’d cultivated to no avail. Ultimately, Gibson would receive safe passage back to Miami via the intervention of the Swiss embassy It’s also intriguing how the HSCA appears to have declined to ever interview Drexel Gibson, despite the fact that future OP40 assassins were being trained and Castro assassination plans were being fine tuned under his very nose.
The HSCA’s glaring overlooking of Gibson may have something to do with the fact that one of the primary CIA files pertaining to Drexel Gibson is Case 36,973, which I believe was an interview conducted by the Agency after his retrieval from G-2 prisons. In a summary of the interview dated January 8, 1962, the Agency appears to pay special interest to Drexel’s connection to Johnny Martino, the manager of Santos Trafficante’s Deauville Casino in the late ‘50s, a slot machine wiz who worked with Lansky & Trafficante business associate Lewis McWillie (who you’ll remember we mentioned in connection to Frank Sturgis via the Tropicana and who was also friends with Jack Ruby). Martino, an alleged drug addict per the CIA, had been imprisoned by G-2 after he made critical comments about Castro in public—Martino wallowed in the La Cabaña prison for 3 years, the 18th century fortress complex that had been repurposed and where Drexel and Martino crossed paths. Martino would later participate in a Ted Shackley-directed JM/WAVE operation titled TILT, joining a small group that sneaked into Cuba to smuggle out two Soviet officers William Pawley had been led to believe, via Eddie Bayo, wanted to defect to the States. The operation was unsuccessful. In 1964, Martino claimed in an article:
…that in 1963 Fidel Castro had discovered an American plot to overthrow his government. It was therefore decided to retaliate by organizing the assassination of Kennedy. Martino and Nathaniel Weyl both claimed that Lee Harvey Oswald had been in Cuba in 1963 and had been recruited by Cuban intelligence to kill Kennedy.
Martino told his friend, Fred Claasen, that he was not telling the truth about the Cubans being behind the assassination of Kennedy. He admitted that he had been involved in the conspiracy by acting as a courier delivering money. He also told the same story to his wife Florence Martino.
Shortly before his death in 1975 Martino confessed to a Miami Newsday reporter, John Cummings, that he had been guilty of spreading false stories implicating Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination. He claimed that two of the gunmen were Cuban exiles. It is believed the two men were Herminio Diaz Garcia and Virgilio Gonzalez. Cummings added: "He told me he'd been part of the assassination of Kennedy. He wasn't in Dallas pulling a trigger, but he was involved. He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things.... He asked me not to write it while he was alive.”
Considering Drexel Gibson’s connection to Johnny Martino, perhaps the seeming disinterest of the CIA in questioning him and the large redactions in the Case file I enclosed above had something to do with covering up Martino’s activities in the early 1960s. Speaking of Gibson again, I also found a University of Florida obituary for Drexel from 1998 that appears to corroborate his FBI connections in Panama during WWII.
Drexel W. Gibson, 85, of Naples, Florida, died May 2,
1998 at home. He was awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom
and the Vasco Nunez de Balboa award for his WWII work in
Panama where he served as Liaison between the Panama
Canal Governor and the Rep. of Panama. He later worked
for the Displaced Persons Commission in Hamburg,
Germany and Austria. He retired as vice president of the
Berlitz School of Languages in Boston, Mass.
He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Mary K. (Icaza)
Gibson; a son, Drexel B. of Victor, Idaho; a daughter, M.
Kathryn Gibson of Spring Creek, Fla. And a granddaughter,
Aura.
Returning to Antonio Veciana—death squad colleague of “Monkey” Morales and fellow Phillips recruit who was also trained at Beritz—an even more detailed account of Veciana’s training at Berlitz Language School in Havana, which also included extensive instruction in psychological operations besides sabotage techniques and organizing strategies, can be found in the HSCA document “Anti-Castro Activities and Organizations and LHO in New Orleans” (NARA Record Number: 180-10147-10240):
Antonio Veciana, Melton’s trainee who surely knew Drexel Gibson, would arrive in Miami mere months after Ricardo “Monkey” Morales’ exfiltration in November of 1960, and per the Miami Herald’s obituary of the Alpha 66 architect, his defection was reportedly triggered by his late 1960 assassination plot going sideways, meaning that the CIA’s documentary disavowal of such plans may have been preemptive and unrepresentative of what actually occurred, as hinted at by his claim that a “bazooka misfired”. In the above passages, we also find further descriptions illustrating how the future Operation 40 members were recruited in an off-the-books capacity outside of official channels and without the “customary checks”. While this may seem like a minor distinction, the construction of the covert anti-Castro Mafia machinery (as Gen. Fabian Escalante adroitly terms it) was predicated upon as threadbare of a paper trail as possible. This was a crucial precondition that enabled all of the clandestine operations and assassinations which the Operation 40 members would go on to carry out on behalf of the intersecting CIA - organized crime nexus as an “autonomous”, loosely-defined private intelligence underground of sorts as the Cold War progressed into its later stages. The present privatization of intelligence today is, in many respects, a continuation of historical espionage trends already set in motion by the Cuban Show and the relationship between the CIA and the anti-Castro terrorists they cultivated.
This is the first article in a planned series mapping the entirety of Ricardo “Monkey” Morales’ clandestine career. A narrated audio version of this research piece will follow on PPM podcast channels. Subscribe to the PPM Patreon to access the entire podcast catalog and the forthcoming episode.
Subsequent installments will cover: Morales’ enlistment in Operation 40; his involvement in the Bay of Pigs; his JM/WAVE activities; his Angleton-orchestrated deployment to the Congo; his moonlighting as an incendiary enforcer for Miami mobsters; his informing for the feds; his inclusion in a joint DEA/CIA operation; his work as a CIA asset’s second-in-command in the Venezuelan DISIP (the national intelligence & counterintel service) during the mid-’70s; his ties to the Orlando Letelier and Cubana Flight 455 bombings; his increasingly erratic and paranoid activities in the cocaine underworld of Miami in the early ‘80s; and finally, his cold-blooded assassination.
Next time on “Ghosts of Covert Pasts”...
Dissolve to: A moonlit Miami Beach. A quiet cul de sac on a neighborhood peninsula flanked by water on all three sides. August, 1967. A man in a scuba suit and goggles with an oxygen tank on his back emerges from the surf. Perhaps he surfaces by a shack with a surfboard rack protruding from its side. Above him, a flat, capacious home sits on an overlook. A sky blue Cadillac with tail fins rests in a carport. Inside, a lithe, freckled Playboy bunny with a dyed, Marilyn Monroe bob and wearing a princess sheathed lingerie one-piece slumbers into the chest of her snoring, 37 year old Mobster jewel thief husband. In another room, 4 children of varying ages sleep like angels on a dual set of bunk beds. The man in the wetsuit has a waterproof bag on his back—he unzips it and pulls what appear to be plastic explosives from its confines. On the cul de sac in front of the home, a vehicle idles. Two owl-eyed men in suits smoke furiously in the front seats. The scuba diver sneaks up to the side of the home. He glances at the back door for a moment, seems to pause as he considers his options, and then ape walks off in the direction of the carport adjacent to the house, keeping his head below the one lit window in the kitchen. He lets himself into the carport from a side door hidden from the view of the cul de sac and places the C-4 next to the Caddie. He scurries back off into the swooning Miami night. He stops on the edge of the water and stands to his full stature for the first time, pressing a remote triggering device with the whorl of his thumb. Microseconds later, there is a cacophonous burst and crunch as the detonation disfigures the Cadillac and speedboat in the garage, shattering all the windows of the home. The Playboy bunny’s eyelids fling awake as she screams. The men in the car across the street tumble out of their car in bleary-eyed panic. The scuba diver melts into the waves. The Miami Mob Underworld has been ripped by yet another explosive attack and Ricardo “Monkey” Morales has struck again (Farzad, Hotel Scarface).
