3,000 Cuban agents and subagents, with a small army of case officers to direct
and look after each one. According to one account, there were at least 55 dummy
corporations to provide employment, cover, and commercial disguise for all these
operatives. There were detective bureaus, gun stores, real estate brokerages, boat
repair shops, and party boats for fishing and other entertainments. There was the
clandestine Radio Swan, later renamed Radio Americas. There were fleets of
specially modified boats based at Homestead Marina, and at other marinas
throughout the Florida Keys. Agents were assigned to the University of Miami
and other educational institutions.
The raison d'être of the massive capability commanded by Theodore Shackley
was now Operation Mongoose, a program for sabotage raids and assassinations to
be conducted on Cuban territory, with a special effort to eliminate Fidel Castro
personally. In order to run these operations from US territory, flagrant and
extensive violation of federal and state laws was the order of the day. Documents
regarding the incorporation of businesses were falsified. Income tax returns were
faked. FAA regulations were violated by planes taking off for Cuba or for forward
bases in the Bahamas and elsewhere. Explosives moved across highways that
were full of civilian traffic. The Munitions Act, the Neutrality Act, the customs
and immigrations laws were routinely flaunted. 13 Above all, the drug laws were
massively violated as the gallant anti-communist fighters filled their planes and
boats with illegal narcotics to be smuggled back into the US when they returned
from their missions. By 1963, the drug-running activities of the covert operatives
were beginning to attract attention. JM/WAVE, in sum, accelerated the slide of
south Florida towards the status of drug and murder capital of the United States it
achieved during the 1980's, when it became as notorious as Chicago during
Prohibition.
It cannot be the task of this study to even begin to treat the reasons for which
certain leading elements of the Anglo-American financial oligarchy, perhaps
acting with certain kinds of support from continental European aristocratic and
neofascist networks, ordered the murder of John F. Kennedy. The British and the
Harrimanites wanted escalation in Vietnam; by the time of his assassination
Kennedy was committed to a pullout of US forces. Kennedy, as shown by his
American University speech of 1963, was also interested in seeking a more stable
path of war avoidance with the Soviets, using the US military superiority
demonstrated during the Cuban missile crisis to convince Moscow to accept a
policy of world peace through economic development. Kennedy was interested in
the possibilities of anti-missile strategic defense to put an end to that nightmare of
mutually assured destruction which appealed to Henry Kissinger, a disgruntled
former employee of the Kennedy administration whom the president had
denounced as a madman. Kennedy was considering moves to limit or perhaps
abolish the usurpation of authority over the national currency by the Wall Street
and London interests controlling the Federal Reserve System. If re-elected to a
second term, Kennedy was likely to have re-asserted presidential control, as
distinct from Wall Street control, over the intelligence community. There is good