M2RB:
William Alexander Morgan being applauded by Fidel Castro, in Havana in 1959. Morgan said that he had joined the Cuban Revolution because “the most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others.”
The Yankee Comandante
A story of love, revolution, and betrayal.
by David Grann 28 May 2012
For a moment, he was obscured by the Havana night. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been before coming to Cuba, in the midst of revolution. Then a burst of floodlights illuminated him: William Alexander Morgan, the great Yankee comandante. He was standing, with his back against a bullet-pocked wall, in an empty moat surrounding La Cabaña—an eighteenth-century stone fortress, on a cliff overlooking Havana Harbor, that had been converted into a prison. Flecks of blood were drying on the patch of ground where Morgan’s friend had been shot, moments earlier. Morgan, who was thirty-two, blinked into the lights. He faced a firing squad.
The gunmen gazed at the man they
had been ordered to kill. Morgan was nearly six feet tall, and had the
powerful arms and legs of someone who had survived in the wild. With a
stark jaw, a pugnacious nose, and scruffy blond hair, he had the gallant
look of an adventurer in a movie serial, of a throwback to an earlier
age, and photographs of him had appeared in newspapers and magazines
around the world. The most alluring images—taken when he was fighting in
the mountains, with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara—showed Morgan, with an
untamed beard, holding a Thompson submachine gun. Though he was now
shaved and wearing prison garb, the executioners recognized him as the
mysterious Americano who once had been hailed as a hero of the revolution.
It
was March 11, 1961, two years after Morgan had helped to overthrow the
dictator Fulgencio Batista, bringing Castro to power. The revolution had
since fractured, its leaders devouring their own, like Saturn, but the
sight of Morgan before a firing squad was a shock. In 1957, when Castro
was still widely seen as fighting for democracy, Morgan had travelled
from Florida to Cuba and headed into the jungle, joining a guerrilla
force. In the words of one observer, Morgan was “like Holden Caulfield
with a machine gun.” He was the only American in the rebel army and the
sole foreigner, other than Guevara, an Argentine, to rise to the army’s
highest rank, comandante.
After the revolution, Morgan’s
role in Cuba aroused even greater fascination, as the island became
enmeshed in the larger battle of the Cold War. An American who knew
Morgan said that he had served as Castro’s “chief cloak-and-dagger man,”
and Time called him Castro’s “crafty, U.S.-born double agent.”
Now
Morgan was charged with conspiring to overthrow Castro. The Cuban
government claimed that Morgan had actually been working for U.S.
intelligence—that he was, in effect, a triple agent. Morgan denied the
allegations, but even some of his friends wondered who he really was,
and why he had come to Cuba.
Before Morgan was led outside La
Cabaña, an inmate asked him if there was anything he could do for him.
Morgan replied, “If you ever get out of here alive, which I doubt you
will, try to tell people my story.” Morgan grasped that more than his
life was at stake: the Cuban regime would distort his role in the
revolution, if not excise it from the public record, and the U.S.
government would stash documents about him in classified files, or
“sanitize” them by concealing passages with black ink. He would be
rubbed out—first from the present, then from the past.
The
head of the firing squad shouted, “Attention!” The gunmen raised their
Belgian rifles. Morgan feared for his wife, Olga—whom he had met in the
mountains—and for their two young daughters. He had always managed to
bend the forces of history, and he had made a last-minute plea to
communicate with Castro. Morgan had believed that the man he once called
his “faithful friend” would never kill him. But now the executioners
were cocking their guns.
THE FIRST TRICK
When
Morgan arrived in Havana, in December, 1957, he was propelled by the
thrill of a secret. He made sure that he wasn’t being followed as he
moved surreptitiously through the neon-lit capital. Advertised as the
“Playland of the Americas,” Havana offered one temptation after another:
the Sans Souci night club, where, on outdoor stages, dancers with frank
hips swayed under the stars to the cha-cha; the Hotel Capri, whose slot
machines spat out American silver dollars; and the Tropicana, where
guests such as Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando enjoyed lavish revues
featuring the Diosas de Carne, or “flesh goddesses.”
Morgan, then
a pudgy twenty-nine-year-old, tried to appear as just another man of
leisure. He wore a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar white suit with a white
shirt, and a new pair of shoes. “I looked like a real fat-cat tourist,”
he later joked.
But, according to members of Morgan’s inner
circle, and to the unpublished account of a close friend, he avoided the
glare of the city’s night life, making his way along a street in Old
Havana, near a wharf that offered a view of La Cabaña, with its
drawbridge and moss-covered walls. Morgan paused by a telephone booth,
where he encountered a Cuban contact named Roger Rodríguez. A
raven-haired student radical with a thick mustache, Rodríguez had once
been shot by police during a political demonstration, and he was a
member of a revolutionary cell.
Most tourists remained oblivious
of the many iniquities of Cuba, where people often lived without
electricity or running water. Graham Greene, who published “Our Man in
Havana” in 1958, later recalled, “I enjoyed the louche atmosphere of
Batista’s city and I never stayed long enough to become aware of the sad
political background of arbitrary imprisonment and torture.” Morgan,
however, had briefed himself on Batista, who had seized power in a coup,
in 1952: how the dictator liked sitting in his palace, eating sumptuous
meals and watching horror films, and how he tortured and killed
dissidents, whose bodies were sometimes dumped in fields, with their
eyes gouged out or their crushed testicles stuffed in their mouths.
Morgan
and Rodríguez resumed walking through Old Havana, and began a furtive
conversation. Morgan was rarely without a cigarette, and typically
communicated through a haze of smoke. He didn’t know Spanish, but
Rodríguez spoke broken English. They had previously met in Miami,
becoming friends, and Morgan believed that he could trust him. Morgan
confided that he planned to sneak into the Sierra Maestra, a mountain
range on Cuba’s remote southeastern coast, where revolutionaries had
taken up arms against the regime. He intended to enlist with the rebels,
who were commanded by Fidel Castro.
The name of Batista’s mortal
enemy carried the jolt of the forbidden. On November 25, 1956, Castro, a
thirty-year-old lawyer and the illegitimate son of a prosperous
landowner, had launched from Mexico an amphibious invasion of Cuba,
along with eighty-one self-styled commandos, including Che Guevara.
After their battered wooden ship ran aground, Castro and his men waded
through chest-deep waters, and came ashore in a swamp whose tangled
vegetation tore their skin. Batista’s Army soon ambushed them, and
Guevara was shot in the neck. (He later wrote, “I immediately began to
wonder what would be the best way to die, now that all seemed lost.”)
Only a dozen or so rebels, including the wounded Guevara and Castro’s
younger brother, Raúl, escaped, and, exhausted and delirious with
thirst—one drank his own urine—they fled into the steep jungles of the
Sierra Maestra.
Morgan told Rodríguez that he had been tracking
the progress of the uprising. After Batista mistakenly declared that
Castro had died in the ambush, Castro allowed a Times
correspondent, Herbert Matthews, to be escorted into the Sierra Maestra.
A close friend of Ernest Hemingway, Matthews longed not merely to cover
world-changing events but to make them, and he was captivated by the
tall rebel leader, with his wild beard and burning cigar. “The
personality of the man is overpowering,” Matthews wrote. “Here was an
educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage.” Matthews
concluded that Castro had “strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social
justice, the need to restore the Constitution.” On February 24, 1957,
the story appeared on the paper’s front page, intensifying the
rebellion’s romantic aura. Matthews later put it this way: “A bell
tolled in the jungles of the Sierra Maestra.”
Yet why would an
American be willing to die for Cuba’s revolution? When Rodríguez pressed
Morgan, he indicated that he wanted to be both on the side of good and
on the edge of danger, but he also wanted something else: revenge.
Morgan said that he had an American buddy who had travelled to Havana
and been killed by Batista’s soldiers. Later, Morgan provided more
details to others in Cuba: his friend, a man named Jack Turner, had been
caught smuggling weapons to the rebels, and was “tortured and tossed to
the sharks by Batista.”
Morgan told Rodríguez that he had already
made contact with another revolutionary, who had arranged to sneak him
into the mountains. Rodríguez was taken aback: the supposed rebel was an
agent of Batista’s secret police. Rodríguez warned Morgan that he’d
fallen into a trap.
Rodríguez, fearing for Morgan’s life, offered
to help him. He could not transport Morgan to the Sierra Maestra, but
he could take him to the camp of a rebel group in the Escambray
Mountains, which cut across the central part of the country. These
guerrillas were opening a new front, and Castro welcomed them to the
“common struggle.”
Morgan set out with Rodríguez and a driver on
the two-hundred-and-seventeen mile journey. As Aran Shetterly details in
his incisive biography “The Americano” (2007), the car soon arrived at a
military roadblock. A soldier peered inside at Morgan in his gleaming
suit, the only outfit that he seemed to own. Morgan knew what would
happen if he were seized—as Guevara said, “in a revolution, one wins or
dies”—and he had prepared a cover story, in which he was an American
businessman on his way to see coffee plantations. After hearing the
tale, the soldier let them pass, and Morgan and his conspirators roared
up the road, up into the Escambray, where the air became cooler and
thinner, and where the three-thousand-foot peaks had an eerie purple
tint.
Morgan was taken to a safe house to rest, then driven to a
mountainside near the town of Banao. A peasant shepherded Morgan and
Rodríguez through vines and banana leaves until they reached a remote
clearing, flanked by steep slopes. The peasant made a birdlike sound,
which rang through the forest and was reciprocated by a distant whistle.
A sentry emerged, and Morgan and Rodríguez were led to a campsite
strewn with water basins and hammocks and a few antiquated rifles.
Morgan could count only thirty or so men, many of whom appeared barely
out of high school and had the emaciated, straggly look of shipwreck
survivors.
The rebels regarded Morgan uncertainly. Max Lesnik, a
Cuban journalist in charge of the organization’s propaganda, soon met up
with the group, and recalls wondering if Morgan was “some kind of agent
from the C.I.A.”
Since the Spanish-American War, the U.S. had
often meddled in Cuban affairs, treating the island like a colony.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower had blindly supported Batista—believing
that he would “deal with the Commies,” as he put it to Vice-President
Richard Nixon—and the C.I.A. had activated operatives throughout the
island. In 1954, in a classified report, an American general advised
that if the U.S. was to survive the Cold War it needed to “learn to
subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more
sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us.”
The C.I.A. went so far as to hire a renowned magician, John Mulholland,
to teach operatives sleight of hand and misdirection. Mulholland
produced two illustrated manuals, which referred to covert operations as
“tricks.”
As the C.I.A. tried to assess the threat to Batista,
its operatives attempted to penetrate rebel forces in the mountains.
Among other things, agents were believed to have recruited, or posed as,
reporters. Mulholland advised operatives that “even more practice is
needed to act a lie skillfully than is required to tell one.”
The
rebels also had to be sure that Morgan was not a K.G.B. operative, or a
mercenary working for Batista’s military intelligence. In the Sierra
Maestra, Castro had recently discovered that a peasant within his ranks
was an Army informant. The peasant, after being summoned, dropped to his
knees, begging that the revolution take care of his children. Then he
was shot in the head.
Morgan was now brought to
see the commander of the rebel group, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo.
Twenty-three years old, soft-spoken, and bone-thin, Menoyo had a long,
handsome face that was shielded by dark spectacles and a beard, giving
him the look of a fugitive. The C.I.A. later noted, in its file on him,
that he was an intelligent, capable young man who would not break “under
normal interrogating techniques.”
As a boy, Menoyo had emigrated
from Spain—a lisp was faintly present when he spoke Spanish—and he had
inherited his family’s militant posture toward tyranny. His oldest
brother had been killed, at the age of sixteen, fighting the Fascists
during the Spanish Civil War. His other brother, who had also come to
Cuba, had been gunned down while leading a doomed assault on Batista’s
palace, in 1957. Menoyo had identified the body at a Havana morgue
before heading into the mountains. “I wanted to continue the fight in my
brother’s name,” he recalls.
Through a translator, Morgan told
Menoyo his story about wanting to avenge a buddy’s death. Morgan said
that he had served in the U.S. Army and was skilled in martial arts and
hand-to-hand combat, and that he could train the inexperienced rebels in
guerrilla warfare. There was more to fighting than shooting a rifle,
Morgan argued; as he later said, with the right tactics they could put
“the fear of God” in the enemy. To demonstrate his prowess, Morgan
borrowed a knife and flicked it at a tree at least twenty yards away. It
hit the target so squarely that some rebels gasped.
That evening, they argued over whether Morgan could stay. Morgan seemed simpático—“like
a Cuban,” as Lesnik puts it. But many rebels, fearing that he was an
infiltrator, wanted to send Morgan back to Havana. The group’s chief of
intelligence, Roger Redondo, recalls, “We did everything possible to
make him leave.” During the next several days, they marched him
endlessly up and down the mountainsides. Morgan was so fat, one rebel
joked, that he had to be C.I.A.
Morgan, famished and fatigued, repeatedly hollered a few Spanish words that he had learned, “No soy mulo”—“I’m
not a mule!” At one point, the rebels led him into a patch of prickly
poisonous shrubs, which stung like wasps and caused his chest and face
to become grievously inflamed. Morgan could no longer sleep at night.
When he removed his sweaty white shirt, Redondo recalls, “We pitied him.
He was so fair-skinned and had turned such an angry red.”
Morgan’s
body also offered clues to a violent past. He had burn marks on his
right arm, and a nearly foot-long scar ran across his chest, suggesting
that someone had slashed him with a knife. There was a tiny scar under
his chin, another by his left eye, and several on his left foot. It was
as if he had already suffered years of hardship in the jungle.
Morgan
endured whatever ordeal the rebels subjected him to, shedding
thirty-five pounds along the way. He later wrote that he had become
unrecognizable: “I weigh only—165 lbs and have a beard.” Redondo says,
“The gringo was tough, and the armed men of the Escambray came to admire
his persistence.”
Several weeks after Morgan arrived, a lookout
noticed something moving amid distant cedars and tropical plants. Using
binoculars, he made out six men, in khaki uniforms and wide-brimmed
hats, carrying Springfield rifles. A Batista Army patrol.
Most of
the rebels had never faced combat. Morgan later described them as
“doctors, lawyers, farmers, chemists, boys, students, and old men banded
together.” The lookout sounded the alarm, and Menoyo ordered everyone
to take up positions around the camp. The rebels were not to fire,
Menoyo explained, unless he said so. Morgan crouched beside Menoyo,
holding one of the few semi-automatic rifles. As the soldiers crept
closer, a shot rang out.
It was Morgan.
Menoyo cursed
under his breath as both sides began shooting. Bullets split trees in
half, and a bitter-tasting fog of smoke drifted over the mountainside.
The thunderous sounds of the guns made it nearly impossible to
communicate. A Batista soldier was hit in the shoulder, a scarlet stain
seeping through his uniform, and he tumbled down the mountain like a
boulder. The commander of the Army patrol retrieved the wounded soldier
and, along with the rest of his men, retreated into the wilderness,
leaving a trail of blood.
In the sudden quiet, Menoyo turned to Morgan and yelled, “Why the hell did you fire?”
Morgan,
when he was told in English what Menoyo was saying, seemed baffled. “I
thought you said to shoot when I saw their eyes,” he said. No one had
translated Menoyo’s original command.
Morgan had made a mistake,
but it had only hastened an inevitable battle. Menoyo told Morgan and
the others to clear out: hundreds of Batista’s soldiers would soon be
upon them.
The men stuffed their belongings into backpacks made from sugar sacks. Menoyo took with him a medallion that his mother had given him, depicting the Immaculate Conception. Morgan tucked away his own mementos: photographs of a young boy and a young girl. The rebels divided into two groups, and Morgan set out with Menoyo and twenty others, marching for more than a hundred miles through the mountains.
They
usually moved during the night, then, at dawn, found a sheltered spot
and ate what little food they had, taking turns sleeping while sentries
kept watch. Morgan, who called one of his semi-automatic rifles his niño,
always kept a weapon nearby. As darkness returned, the men resumed
marching, listening to the sounds of woodpeckers and barking dogs and
their own exhausted breathing. Their bodies slackened from hunger, and
beards covered their faces like jungle growth. When a nineteen-year-old
rebel fell and broke his foot, Morgan supported him, making sure that he
was not left behind.
One morning during the march, a rebel was
scrounging for food when he spotted about two hundred Batista soldiers
in a nearby valley. The rebels faced annihilation. As panic spread,
Morgan helped Menoyo devise a plan. They would prepare an ambush, hiding
behind a series of large stones, in a U formation. It was critical,
Morgan said, to leave an escape route. The rebels crouched behind the
stones, feeling the warmth of the earth against their bodies, holding
their rifles steady against their cheeks. Earlier, some of the young men
had professed cheerful indifference to death, but their brio vanished
as they confronted the prospect.
Morgan braced himself for the
fight. He had inserted himself into a foreign conflict, and now
everything was at risk. His predicament was akin to that of Robert
Jordan, the American protagonist of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” who,
while aiding the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, must blow up a
bridge: “He had only one thing to do and that was what he should think
about. . . . To worry was as bad as to be afraid. It simply made things
more difficult.”
Batista’s soldiers approached the ridge. Though
the rebels could hear branches snapping under the soldiers’ boots,
Menoyo told his men to hold fire, making sure that Morgan understood
this time. Soon, the enemy soldiers were so close that Morgan could see
the barrels of their guns. “Patria o Muerte,” Castro liked to
say—“Fatherland or Death.” Finally, Menoyo gave the signal to shoot.
Amid the screaming, blood, and chaos, some of the rebels fell back, but,
as Shetterly wrote, “they noticed Morgan out in front of everyone,
moving ahead, completely focused on the fight.”
Batista’s
soldiers started to flee. “They folded,” Armando Fleites, a medic with
the rebels, recalls. “It was a complete victory.”
More than a
dozen of Batista’s soldiers were wounded or killed. The rebels, who took
the dead soldiers’ guns, had not lost a single man, and afterward they
enlisted Morgan to teach them better ways to fight. One former rebel
recalls, “He trained me in guerrilla warfare—how to handle different
weapons, how to plant bombs.” Morgan instructed the men in judo and how
to breathe underwater using a hollow reed. “There were so many things
that he knew that we didn’t,” the rebel says. Morgan even knew some
Japanese and German.
He learned Spanish, becoming a full member of
the group, which was dubbed the Second National Front of the Escambray.
Like the other rebels, Morgan took an oath to “fight and defend with my
life this little piece of free territory,” to “guard all the war
secrets,” and to “denounce traitors.” Morgan rose quickly, first
commanding half a dozen men, then leading a larger column and, finally,
presiding over several square kilometres of occupied territory.
As
Morgan won more battles, the news of his curious presence began
filtering out. A Cuban rebel radio station reported that rebels “led by
an American” had killed forty Batista soldiers. Another broadcast hailed
a “Yankee fighting for the liberty of Cuba.” The Miami newspaper Diario Las Américas
stated that the American had been a “member of the ‘Rangers’ who landed
in Normandy and opened the way to the Allied forces by destroying the
Nazi installations on the French coast before D Day.”
U.S. and
Cuban intelligence agents also began picking up chatter about a Yankee
commando. In the summer of 1958, the C.I.A. reported whispers of a
rebel, “identified only as ‘El Americano,’ ” who had played a
critical role in “planning and carrying out guerrilla activities,” and
who had virtually wiped out a Batista unit while leading his men in an
ambush. An informant from a Cuban revolutionary group told the F.B.I.
that El Americano was Morgan. Another said that Morgan had
“risked his life many times” to save the rebels, and was considered
“quite a hero among these forces for bravery and daring.” The reports
eventually set off a scramble among U.S. government agencies—including
the C.I.A., the Secret Service, the State Department, Army intelligence,
and the F.B.I.—to determine who William Alexander Morgan was, and whom
he was working for.
THE SECRET DOSSIER
J.
Edgar Hoover was feeling tremors of instability. First, there was his
heart: in 1958, he had suffered a minor attack, at the age of
sixty-three. The head of the F.B.I., Hoover was obsessed with his
privacy, and kept the incident largely to himself, but he began a
relentless diet-and-exercise regimen, disciplining his body with the
same force of will that had eradicated a childhood stutter. He
instructed the bureau’s research-and-analysis section to inform him of
any scientific advancement that might extend the human life span.
Compounding
Hoover’s unease was that “infernal little Cuban republic,” as Theodore
Roosevelt had described it. Hoover warned his agents that the growing
number of Castro followers in the U.S. “may pose a threat to the
internal security” of the country, and he had ordered his agents to
infiltrate their organizations.
Although Hoover rarely travelled
abroad, he wanted to transform the F.B.I. into an international spy
apparatus, building upon the vast network that he had created within the
U.S., which trafficked in raw history: wiretapped conversations,
surveillance photographs, papers from garbage bins, intercepted cables,
gossip from ex-lovers.
The U.S. intelligence branches had not yet
turned up evidence that Castro or his followers were Communists, and,
given Batista’s brutality, some American officials were developing a
soft stance toward the rebels. The C.I.A. officer in charge of Caribbean
operations later acknowledged, “My staff and I were all Fidelistas.”
But
Hoover remained vigilant: of all the enemies that he had hunted, he
considered the agents of Communism the “Masters of Deceit,” as he called
his 1958 best-selling book about them. These plotters had hidden
streams of information, and they mutated, like viruses, in order to slip
past a host’s defenses; Hoover was determined to stop them from
infiltrating an island just south of Florida. A source inside the U.S.
Embassy in Havana had informed him that Batista’s hold on the country
was “weakening.” Now Hoover was receiving reports of a wild gringo up in
the mountains. Was Morgan a Soviet sleeper agent? A C.I.A. operative in
a cover posture? Or one who had gone rogue?
After peering into so
many lives, Hoover understood that virtually everyone has secrets.
Scribbled in a diary. Recorded on a cassette. Buried in a safe-deposit
box. A secret may be, as Don DeLillo has written, “something
vitalizing.” But it can also cut you down at any moment.
By late
1958, Hoover had unleashed a team of G-men to figure out what Morgan
might he hiding. One of them eventually knocked on the door of a large
Colonial house in the Old West End of Toledo, Ohio. A
distinguished-looking gentleman greeted him. It was Morgan’s father,
Alexander, a retired budget director of a utility company and, as his
son once described him, a “solid Republican.” He was married to a slim,
devout woman, Loretta, who was known as Miss Cathedral, for her
involvement in the Catholic church down the street. In addition to their
son, they had a daughter, Carroll. Morgan’s father told the F.B.I.
agent that he had not heard from his son, whom he called Bill, since he
disappeared. But he provided a good deal of information about Morgan,
and this, combined with F.B.I. interviews of other relatives and
associates, helped Hoover and his spies piece together a startling
profile of the Yankee rebel.
Morgan should have
been a quintessential American, a shining product of Midwestern values
and a rising middle class. He attended Catholic school and initially
earned high marks. (His I.Q. test showed “superior intelligence.”) He
loved the outdoors and was a dedicated Boy Scout, receiving the
organization’s highest award, in 1941. Years later, he wrote to his
parents, “You . . . have done all that is possible to bring up your
children with love of God and country.” Wildly energetic, he always
seemed to be chattering, earning the nickname Gabby. “He was so
likable,” his sister told me. “He could sell you anything.”
But
Morgan was also a misfit. He failed to make the football team, and his
constant banter exposed a seam of insecurity. He disliked school and
often slipped away to read stories of adventure, especially tales about
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, filling his mind with
places far more exotic than the neighborhood of cropped lawns and boxy
houses outside his bedroom window. His mother once said that Morgan had a
“very, very vivid imagination,” and that he had brought his fancies to
life, constructing, among other things, a “diving helmet” worthy of
Jules Verne. He rarely showed “fear of anything,” and once had to be
stopped from jumping off the roof with a homemade parachute.
U.S.
Army intelligence officials also investigated Morgan, preparing a
dossier on him. (The dossier, along with hundreds of other declassified
documents from the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Army, and the State
Department, was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and
through the National Archives.) In the Army’s psychological assessment, a
military-intelligence analyst stated that the young Morgan “seemed to
be fairly well adjusted to society.” But, by the time he was a
teen-ager, his resistance to the strictures around him, and to those who
wanted to pound him into shape, had reached a feverish state. As his
mother put it, he had decided that, if he would never belong in Toledo,
he would embrace exile, venturing “out in the world himself.”
In
the summer of 1943, at the age of fifteen, Morgan ran away. His mother
later gave a report to the Red Cross about her son, saying, “Shocked
is the mild word for it. . . for he had never done anything like this
before.” Although Morgan returned home a few days later, he soon stole
his father’s car and “took off” again, as he later put it, blowing
through a red light before the police caught him. He was consigned to a
detention center, but he slipped out a window and vanished again. He
ended up in Chicago, where he joined the Ringling Brothers circus. Ten
days later, his father found him taking care of the elephants, and
brought him home.
In the ninth grade, Morgan dropped out of
school and began roaming the country, hopping buses and freighters; he
earned money as a punch-press operator, a grocery clerk, a ranch hand, a
coal loader, a movie-theatre usher, and a seaman in the Merchant
Marine. His father seemed resigned to his son’s fitfulness, telling him
in a letter, “Get as much adventure as you can and we will be glad to
see you whenever you decide you want to come home.”
Morgan later
explained that he had not been unhappy at home—his parents had given him
and his sister “anything that we wanted”—and had fled only because he
longed “to see new places.”
His mother believed that he had a
mythic image of himself, and “always seemed to yearn to be a big shot,”
but, given his “super affectionate nature,” she doubted that “he has
really meant to worry or hurt us.”
Nevertheless, Morgan
increasingly took up with “the wrong kind of gangs of boys,” as he later
called them, and got in scrapes with the law. While still a minor, he
and some friends stole a stranger’s car, temporarily tying up the
driver; he was also investigated for carrying a concealed weapon.
Nobody—not
his parents, not the F.B.I., not the military-intelligence
analyst—could unravel the mystery of Morgan’s antisocial behavior; it
remained forever encrypted, an unbreakable code. His mother wondered
whether something had happened to him during her pregnancy, lamenting,
“That boy hasn’t given me a moment’s peace. . . . That’s why my hair is
gray.” His father told the F.B.I. that perhaps his son needed to see one
of those head doctors. A psychiatrist, cited by Army intelligence,
speculated that Morgan was “driven along a course of self-destruction in
order to satisfy his neurotic need for punishment.”
Yet it was
possible to see Morgan, with his brooding blue eyes and cigarette
perpetually clamped between his teeth, as heralding a new social type: a
beatnik, a rolling stone. A friend of Morgan’s once told a reporter,
“Jack Kerouac was still imagining life on the road while Morgan was out
there living it.”
Morgan’s personality—“nomadic, egocentric,
impulsive, and utterly irresponsible,” as Hoover’s agents put it—also
had some similarities with that of a middle-class teen-ager thousands of
miles away. In 1960, a conservative American journalist observed, “Like
Fidel Castro, though on a lesser scale, Morgan was a superannuated
juvenile delinquent.”
Hoover and the F.B.I. discovered that,
contrary to press accounts, Morgan had not served during the Second
World War. Envisaging himself as a modern Sinbad—his other nickname—he
had tried to enlist but was turned away, because he was too young. It
was not until August, 1946, when the war was over and he was finally
eighteen, that he joined the Army. After receiving orders that he would
be deployed to Japan, in December, he cried in front of his mother for
the first time in years, betraying that, despite his toughness, he was
still just a teen-ager. He boarded a train for California, where he had a
layover at a base, and on the way he sent his parents a telegram:
Have surprise—married yesterday 12:30 am to Darlene Edgerton. Am happy—will write or call soon as possible. Don’t worry or get excited.
He had sat beside her on the train, in his starched uniform. “He was tall and handsome and so magnetic,” Edgerton, who is now eighty-seven and blind, recalls. “Truthfully, I was coming home to marry someone else, and we just hit it off and so we stopped off in Reno and got married.” They had known each other for only twenty-four hours and spent two days in a hotel before getting back on a train. When they reached California, Morgan reported to the base and left for Japan. “What young people will do,” Edgerton says.
With Morgan stationed in Japan, the marriage
dissolved after a year and a half, and Edgerton received an
annulment—though even after she married another man she kept a letter
from Morgan stashed away, which she occasionally unfolded, flattening
the edges with her fingers, and read again, stirred by the memory of the
comet-like figure who had briefly blazed into her life.
Morgan
was crestfallen by the end of the relationship, but his mother told the
Red Cross, “Knowing Bill, I am sure if he had an opportunity to date
other girls he would soon forget this present love.”
Indeed,
Morgan took up with Setsuko Takeda, a German-Japanese night-club hostess
in Kyoto, and got her pregnant. When Takeda was about to give birth to
their son, in the fall of 1947, he could not get a leave, and so he did
what he had always done: he ran off. He was arrested for being AWOL,
and, while in custody, he claimed that he needed to see Takeda—she was
suicidally distraught after being harassed by another soldier. With the
aid of a Chinese national who was also locked up, Morgan overpowered a
military-police officer and stole his .45. “Morgan told me not to move,”
the officer later testified. “He told me to take off my clothes. Then
he told the Chinaman to tie me up.” Wearing the guard’s uniform and
carrying his gun, Morgan escaped in the middle of the night.
A
military search party located Takeda, and she led authorities to a house
where Morgan had said he would wait for her. When she saw Morgan in the
rear of the building, she threw her arms around him. One of the
officers, seeing the gun in his hand, screamed, “Drop it!” Morgan
hesitated, then, like a character in a dime novel, spun the pistol on
his finger, so that the butt faced the officer, and handed it over. “It
didn’t take you long to get here,” Morgan said, and asked for a
cigarette.
On January 15, 1948, at the age of nineteen, Morgan was
sentenced by a court-martial to five years in prison. “I guess I got
what was coming to me,” he said.
His mother, in her statement to
the Red Cross, pleaded for help: “I sincerely want him to be a boy that I
can justly be proud of, not one to hang my head in shame for having
given him birth.”
Morgan was eventually transferred to a federal
prison in Michigan. He enrolled in a class on American history; studied
Japanese and German, the languages Takeda spoke; attended “religious
instruction classes”; and sang in the church choir. In a progress
report, a prison official wrote, “The Chaplain has noticed that inmate
Morgan has developed a sense of social responsibility” and “is doing
everything possible to improve himself and be an asset to society.”
Morgan
was released early, on April 11, 1950. Though he had once hoped to
reunite with Takeda and their son, the relationship had been severed.
Morgan eventually moved to Florida, where he took a job in a carnival,
as a fire swallower, and mastered the use of knives. He began a romance
with the carnival’s snake charmer, Ellen May Bethel. A small,
tempestuous woman with black hair and green eyes, she was “gorgeous,” a
relative says. In the spring of 1955, Morgan and Bethel had a child,
Anne. They were married several months later, and in 1957 they had a
son, Bill.
Morgan struggled to be an “asset to society,” but he
seemed trapped by his past. He was an ex-con and a dishonorably
discharged soldier—a stain that he tried, futilely, to expunge from his
record. Morgan later told a friend that, during this period, “he was
nothing.”
According to an F.B.I. informant, Morgan went to work
for the Mafia, running errands for Meyer Lansky, the diminutive Jewish
gangster known as Little Man. In addition to overseeing rackets in the
United States, Lanksy had become the kingpin of Havana, controlling many
of its biggest casinos and night clubs. A Mob associate once described
how Lansky “took Batista straight back to our hotel, opened the
suitcases and pointed at the cash. Batista just stared at the money
without saying a word. Then he and Meyer shook hands.”
Morgan
drifted back to the streets of Ohio, where he became associated with a
local crime boss named Dominick Bartone. A gangster whose Mafia ties
reputedly went back to the days of Al Capone, Bartone was a hulking man
with thick black hair and dark eyes—a “typical hoodlum appearance,”
according to his F.B.I. file. He classified people as either “solid” or
“suckers.” His rap sheet eventually included convictions for bribery,
gun-running, tax evasion, and bank fraud, and he was closely allied with
the head of the Teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa, whom he called “the greatest
fella in the world.”
One of Morgan’s friends from Ohio described
him to me as “solid.” He said, “Do you know what ‘connection’ means?
Well, Morgan was connected.” The friend, who said that he had
been indicted for racketeering, suddenly grew quiet, then added, “I
don’t know if you’re with the F.B.I. or the C.I.A.”
Some members
of the Mafia, including Bartone, prepared for shifting alliances in
Cuba, shipping guns to the rebels. Morgan’s father thought that his son
first got caught up in the whole Cuba business in 1955, in Florida, when
he apparently met Castro, who had traveled there to garner support
from the exile community for his upcoming invasion. Two years later,
with Castro ensconced in the Sierra Maestra, Morgan left his wife and
children in Toledo and began acquiring weapons across the U.S. and
arranging for them to be smuggled to the rebels. Perhaps he was
motivated by sympathy with the revolution, or by a desire to make money,
or simply by an urge to flee domestic responsibilities. Morgan’s father
told the F.B.I. that his son had run away “from his problems since he
was a youngster,” and that his Cuban escapade was just another example.
Morgan, who before heading to Havana had told another gunrunner that he
would see him again in Florida “when this damn revolution is over,”
later gave his own explanation: “I have lived always looking for
something.”
To this day, some scholars, and even some who knew
Morgan, speculate that he was sent to the Escambray by the C.I.A. But,
as declassified documents reveal, Hoover and his agents had discovered
something more unsettling. Morgan was not working for the agency or a
foreign intelligence outfit or the Mob. He was out there on his own.
WHY AM I HERE
“Calling Comandante William Morgan! Comandante William Morgan!”
It was one of his men in the Escambray, speaking on shortwave radio.
“Hear me!” came Morgan’s reply. “Send us reinforcements. We need help—ammunition! If we stay here, they will wipe us out.”
By
the summer of 1958, Morgan had endured countless skirmishes. “We were
always outnumbered at least thirty to one,” Morgan recalled. “We were a
small outfit, but we were mobile and hard-hitting. We became known as
the phantoms of the mountains.”
Morgan had witnessed, up close,
the cruelties of the Cuban regime: villages ransacked and burned by
Batista’s Army, friends shot in the head, a senile man’s tongue cut out.
“I know and have seen what these people have been doing,” Morgan said
of Batista’s henchmen.
“They killed. They tortured. They beat people . .
. and done things that don’t have a name.”
On one of his uniform sleeves, Morgan had sewn a U.S. flag. “I was born an American,” he liked to say.
At
night, he often sat by the campfire, where scattered sparks created
fleeting constellations, and listened to the rebels share their visions
of the revolution. The movement’s various factions—including two other
groups in the Escambray and Castro’s forces in the Sierra
Maestra—represented an array of ideologies and personal ambitions. The
Escambray front advocated a Western-style democracy and was staunchly
anti-Communist, a stance that was apparently shared by Fidel Castro,
who, unlike his brother Raúl or Che Guevara, had expressed little
interest in Marxism-Leninism. In the Sierra Maestra, Castro told a
reporter, “I have never been, nor am I now, a Communist. If I were, I
would have sufficient courage to proclaim it.”
In the Escambray,
Morgan and Menoyo had grown increasingly close. Morgan was older, and
almost suicidally brave, like the brother of Menoyo’s who had died in
the Batista raid. Morgan addressed Menoyo as “mi jefe y mi hermano”—“my
chief and my brother”—and told him about his troubled past. Menoyo felt
that Morgan was maturing, as a soldier and a man. “Little by little,
William was changing,” Menoyo says.
In July, after Morgan was promoted to comandante,
he wrote a letter to his mother, something that he had not done during
his six months in the mountains. Written with a distinctive flourish of
dashes, it said, “I know that you neither approve or understand why I am
here—even though you are the one person in the world—that I believe
understands me—I have been many places—in my life and done many things
of which you did not approve—or understand, nor did I understand
myself—at the time.”
He contended with his old sins,
acknowledging how much pain he had caused Ellen, his second wife, and
their children (“these three who I have hurt deeply”) by abandoning
them. “It is hard to understand but I love them very deeply and think of
them often,” he wrote. Ellen had filed for divorce, on the ground of
desertion. “I don’t expect she has much faith or love for me any more,”
Morgan wrote. “And probably she is right.”
Yet he wanted his
mother to understand that he was no longer the same person. “I am here
with men and boys—who fight for . . . freedom,” he wrote. “And if it
should happen that I am killed here—You will know it was not for foolish
fancy—or as dad would say a pipe dream.” The friend who had also
smuggled weapons to the rebels later told the Palm Beach Post,
“He had found his cause in Cuba. He wanted something to believe in. He
wanted to have a purpose. He wanted to be someone, not no one.”
Morgan had composed a more philosophical statement about why he had joined the rebels. The essay, titled “Why Am I Here,” said:
Why do I fight here in this land so foreign to my own? Why did I come here far from my home and family? Why do I worry about these men here in the mountains with me? Is it because they were all close friends of mine? No! When I came here they were strangers to me I could not speak their language or understand their problems. Is it because I seek adventure? No here there is no adventure only the ever existent problems of survive. So why am I here? I am here because I believe that the most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others. I am here so that my son when he is grown will not have to fight or die in a land not his own, because one man or group of men try to take his liberty from him I am here because I believe that free men should take up arms and stand together and fight and destroy the groups and forces that want to take the rights of people away.
In his rush to overturn Cuba’s past as well as his own, Morgan often forgot to pause for periods or paragraph breaks. He acknowledged, “I can not say I have always been a good citizen.” But he explained that “being here I can appreciate the way of life that is ours from birth,” and he recounted the seemingly impossible things that he had seen: “Where a boy of nineteen can march 12 hours with a broken foot over country comparable to the american Rockies without complaint. Where a cigarette is smoked by ten men. Where men do without water so that others may drink.” Noting that U.S. policies had propped up Batista, he concluded, “I ask myself why do we support those who would destroy in other lands the ideals which we hold so dear?”
Morgan sent the statement to someone he was sure would sympathize with it: Herbert Matthews. The Times
reporter considered Morgan to be “the most interesting figure in the
Sierra de Escambray.” Soon after receiving the statement, Matthews
published an article about the Second Front and its “tough, uneducated
young American” leader, citing a cleaned-up passage from Morgan’s
letter.
Other U.S. newspapers began chronicling the exploits of the “adventurous American,” the “swashbuckling Morgan.” The Washington Post
reported that he had become a “daring fellow” by the age of three. The
accounts were enough to “make schoolboys drool,” as one newspaper put
it. A retired businessman from Ohio later told the Toledo Blade, “He was like a cowboy in an Ernest Hemingway adventure.” Morgan had finally willed his interior fictions into reality.
One
day in the spring of 1958, while Morgan was visiting a guerrilla camp
for a meeting of the Second Front’s chiefs of staff, he encountered a
rebel he had never seen before: small and slender, with a face shielded
by a cap. Only up close was it evident that the rebel was a woman. She
was in her early twenties, with dark eyes and tawny skin, and, to
conceal her identity, she had cut her curly light-brown hair short and
dyed it black. Though she had a delicate beauty, she locked and loaded a
gun with the ease of a bank robber. Morgan later said of a pistol that
she carried, “She knows how to use it.”
Her name was Olga
Rodríguez. She came from a peasant family, in the central province of
Santa Clara, that often went without food. “We were so poor,” Rodríguez
recalls. She studied diligently, and was elected class president. Her
goal was to become a teacher. She was bright, stubborn, and
questioning—as Rodríguez puts it, “always a little different.”
Increasingly angered by the Batista regime’s repressiveness, she joined
the underground resistance, organizing protests and assembling bombs
until, one day, agents from Batista’s secret police appeared in her
neighborhood, showing people her photograph. “They were coming to kill
me,” Rodríguez recalls.
When the secret police could not find
her, they beat up her brother, heaving him on her parents’ doorstep
“like a sack of potatoes,” she says. Her friends begged her to leave
Cuba, but she told them, “I will not abandon my country.” In April,
1958, with her appearance disguised and with a tiny .32 pistol tucked in
her underwear, she became the first woman to join the rebels in the
Escambray. She tended to the wounded and taught rebels to read and
write. “I have the spirit of a revolutionary,” she liked to say.
When Morgan met her, he gently teased her about her haircut, pulling down her cap and saying, “Hey, muchacho.” Morgan had arrived at the camp literally riding a white horse, and she had felt her heart go “boom, boom, boom.”
“I
am a great romantic, and I was so moved that someone from another
country would care enough about my countrymen to fight for them,” she
says. Morgan repeatedly sought her out at her camp. She would sometimes
prepare him rice and beans (“I’m a guerrilla, not a cook”), and he would
complain, “Too fast!” as she spoke, in gunfire-patter Spanish, about
the need to hold elections and build hospitals and schools. She seemed
unlike so many of the women whom he had impetuously taken up with. Like
his mother, she had a deep sense of conviction, and it was her
influence, Menoyo says, that furthered “William’s transformation,”
though Rodríguez saw it differently: Morgan was not so much changing as
discovering who he really was. “I knew William had not always been a
saint,” Rodríguez says. “But inside, I could tell, he had a huge
heart—one that he had opened not just to me but to my country.”
Morgan
recognized the risk of surrendering to a flight of emotion in the midst
of war. The Batista regime had placed a twenty-thousand-dollar bounty
on him—“dead or alive,” as Morgan put it. Once, when Morgan and
Rodríguez were together, a military plane shut down its engines, so that
they could not hear its approach until bombs were falling upon them.
“We simply had to dive for cover,” Rodríguez recalls. They barely
escaped unharmed. During other bombing raids, they would hold each
other, whispering, “Our fates are intertwined.”
When Robert Jordan
is overcome with love for a woman during the Spanish Civil War, he
fears that they will never experience what ordinary people do: “Not
time, not happiness, not fun, not children, not a house, not a bathroom,
not a clean pair of pajamas, not the morning paper, not to wake up
together, not to wake and know she’s there and that you’re not alone.
No. None of that.”
As long as Morgan was fighting in the
Escambray, there could be no past or future—only the present. “We could
never have peace,” Rodríguez says. “From the beginning, I had this
terrible feeling that things would not end well.” Yet the impossibility
of their romance only deepened their ardor. Not long after they met, a
boy from a nearby village approached Rodríguez in camp, carrying a bunch
of purple wildflowers. “Look what the Americano has sent you,” the boy told her. A few days later, the boy appeared again, holding a new bouquet.
“From the Americano,” he said.
As
Morgan later told her, they had to “steal time.” In one such moment, a
photographer caught them standing in a mountain clearing. In the image,
both are wearing fatigues; a rifle is slung over his right shoulder, and
she leans on one, as if it were a cane. With their free hands, they are
clutching each other. “When I found you, I found everything I can wish
for in the world,” he later wrote her. “Only death can separate us.”
“MORGAN WAS KILLED THE PREVIOUS NIGHT IN THE COURSE OF A FIGHT WITH THE CUBAN ARMY.”
So read an urgent cable sent from the U.S. Embassy in Havana to Hoover,
at F.B.I. headquarters, on September 19, 1958. The Batista regime,
which had already leaked the news to the Cuban press, mailed the F.B.I.
two photographs of a fractured corpse, shirtless and smeared with blood.
Morgan’s
mother was devastated when she heard of the reports. Several weeks
later, she received a letter from Cuba, in Morgan’s hand. It said, “The
Cuban press last month sent out word that I was dead but as you can tell
I am not.”
Just as Batista’s regime had falsely declared
Castro’s death, it had made the mistake of believing its own propaganda
about Morgan, becoming trapped in the closed circuit of information that
isolates tyrants not only from their countrymen but from reality.
Meanwhile, Morgan’s seeming emergence from the dead, like one of
Mulholland’s magical feats, created a potent counter-illusion: that he
was indestructible.
In October, Che Guevara
arrived in the Escambray, with a hundred or so ghostly-looking soldiers.
They had completed a six-week westward trek from the Sierra Maestra,
withstanding cyclones and enemy fire and sleeping in swamps. Guevara
described his men as “morally broken, starving . . . their feet bloodied
and so swollen they won’t fit into what’s left of their boots.”
Guevara—whom another rebel once depicted as “half athletic and half
asthmatic,” and prone to shifting in conversation “between Stalin and
Baudelaire”—had dark hair nearly to his shoulders. During the march, he
had worn the cap of a dead comrade, but, to his distress, he had lost
it, and so he began wearing a black beret.
The ranks of the Second
Front had grown to more than a thousand men. Morgan wrote to his
mother, “We are much stronger now,” and said that his men were “getting
ready to come down from the hills and take the cities.”
Guevara
had been sent to the Escambray to take control of the Second Front, as
Castro was eager to eliminate any threat to his dominance and to
accelerate the assault on Batista. But many rebels there resisted having
their authority usurped, and submerged tensions between the groups rose
to the surface. When Guevara and his men tried to enter a stretch of
territory, they were confronted by a particularly combative leader of
the Second Front, Jesús Carreras. After demanding a password from
Guevara, Carreras refused to let him or his men pass.
Morgan and Guevara, the two foreign comandantes,
bitterly distrusted each other. The boisterous, fun-loving,
anti-Communist American had little in common with the ascetic, erudite,
Marxist-Leninist Argentine doctor. Morgan complained to Guevara that he
had misappropriated weapons belonging to the Second Front, while Guevara
dismissed Morgan and his defiant guerrillas as comevacas—“cow-eaters”—meaning
that they sat around and lived off the largesse of peasants. Although
Guevara and the Second Front reached an “operational pact,” friction
remained.
In November, 1958, before a climactic push against
Batista’s Army, Morgan slipped away with Rodríguez to a farmhouse in the
mountains, where they arranged to get married. They wore their rebel
uniforms, which they had washed in the river. They didn’t have rings, so
Morgan took a leaf from a tree, rolled it into a circle, and placed it
on her finger, vowing, “I will love you and honor you all the days of my
life.” Rodríguez said, “Hasta que la muerte nos separe”—“Till death do us part.”
After
the ceremony, Morgan picked up his gun and returned to battle. “We
barely had time to kiss,” Rodríguez recalls. As the fighting
intensified, she had a growing sense of unease. To keep her company, he
had given her a parrot that cried “We-liam” and “I love you!” But one day it flew off, and never returned.
In
late December, Guevara and his party launched a ferocious assault in
the Santa Clara province, winning a decisive victory. That month, Morgan
and the Second Front seized the tobacco town of Manicaragua, then
pressed onward, capturing Cumanayagua, El Hoyo, La Moza, and San Juan de
los Yeras, before reaching Topes de Collantes, a hundred and sixty
miles southeast of Havana. One of Batista’s colonels warned,
“Headquarters can’t resist anymore. The Army doesn’t want to fight.” The
Second Front had earlier issued a statement declaring that “the
dictatorship is nearly crushed,” and the U.S. government tried to push
out Batista, in a futile attempt to install an acquiescent “third
force.” Batista resisted the Americans’ pressure, but his hold on power
was nearly gone.
At 4 A.M. on New Year’s Day, David
Atlee Phillips, a C.I.A. agent stationed in Havana, was standing
outside his home there, drinking champagne, when he looked up and saw a
speck of light—an airplane—receding into the sky. Realizing that there
were no departing flights at that hour, he telephoned his case officer,
and offered a gem of information: “Batista just flew into exile.”
“Are you drunk?” the case officer replied.
But
Phillips was right—Batista was escaping, with his entourage, to the
Dominican Republic—and word rapidly spread throughout Cuba: “Se fue! Se fue! ” He’s gone!
Meyer
Lansky was in Havana at the time, and was among the first people there
to be tipped off. “Get the money,” he commanded an associate. “All of
it. Even the cash and checks in reserve.”
After dawn, Morgan was preparing to battle for the city of Cienfuegos when the cry reached him and Rodríguez: Se fue! Se fue! Morgan
ordered his men to take the city immediately. Everyone, including
Rodríguez, jumped into cars and trucks, racing into a city where they
had expected an intense battle but where Batista’s Army, once
impregnable, dissolved before them as thousands of jubilant residents
poured into the streets, honking horns and banging on makeshift drums.
The crowds greeted Morgan, who wrapped a rebel flag around his shoulders
like a cape, to shouts of “Americano!” Morgan, who told reporters, “I’m forgetting my English,” cried at the crowds grasping at him, “Victoria! Libertad!”
In an interview with Look,
Morgan said, “When we came down from the mountains, it was a shock to
all of us . . . to find how much faith the Cuban people had in this
revolution. You felt you simply couldn’t betray their hopes.”
Morgan
was put in charge of Cienfuegos. He had finally become somebody, he
told a friend. On January 6, 1959, at one in the morning, Castro paused
in Cienfuegos during his triumphant march to Havana. It was the first
time that Morgan had met with Castro in Cuba, and the two former
delinquents shook hands and congratulated each other.
In
interviews, Castro repeated his opposition to Communism and promised to
hold elections within eighteen months. Before a gathering of thousands
in Havana, he vowed, “We cannot become dictators.” Whatever doubts
Morgan had about Guevara, he seemed to harbor none about Castro, who
once declared, “History will absolve me.”
“I have a tremendous
admiration—a tremendous respect—for the man,” Morgan later told the
American television broadcaster Clete Roberts. “I respect his moral
courage, and I respect his honesty.” Morgan cast the revolution in his
own distinctive terms: “It’s about time the little guy got a break.”
Roberts
observed that Morgan’s life, including his romance with Rodríguez,
sounded “like all of the movie scripts that were ever dreamt about in
Hollywood.” Morgan insisted that he had no interest in selling his
story: “I don’t believe that you should cash in on your ideals. I don’t
believe I was an idealist when I went up into the mountains, but I feel
that I’m an idealist now.”
Morgan had not slept for two days after
Batista fled, and he welcomed the chance to shave and wash the jungle
grime off his body. Rodríguez soon changed out of her uniform, confident
that “the war was over and that we would raise a family and live in a
democracy.” In Cienfuegos, they exchanged proper wedding rings.
Rodríguez says, “I cannot describe the happiness I felt—we felt.”
Rodríguez
had become pregnant. For Morgan, it suddenly seemed that he and
Rodríguez could have everything: a house, children, the morning paper.
As Morgan put it, “All I’m interested in is settling down to a nice,
peaceful existence.”
THE CONSPIRACY
In
March, 1959, a mysterious American suddenly appeared at the Hotel
Capri, where Morgan and Rodríguez were staying temporarily. The man, who
was in his late forties, had stiff black hair and thick glasses, and
looked like he could be an employee of NASA, the new
space agency. In the lobby, he called Morgan and said that he needed to
see him. His name was Leo Cherne. “I’m sure he never heard of me
before,” Cherne recalled, in an unpublished oral history.
Imposing,
learned, and discreet, Cherne was a wealthy businessman and a power
broker who had advised several U.S. Presidents, including Franklin
Roosevelt and Eisenhower. In 1951, he became chairman of the
International Rescue Committee. Over the years, there was speculation
that, under Cherne, the I.R.C. had sometimes served as a front for
C.I.A. activities—a charge that Cherne publicly denied. In any case, he
was enmeshed with people in intelligence circles, a man who relished
being privy to a cloak-and-dagger world.
In his oral history,
Cherne said that he had once been “deeply attracted” to Castro, rivaling Herbert Matthews in his “blind enthusiasm.” But Cherne had
grown apprehensive after the revolution. With disturbing coolness,
Castro had dispatched several hundred members of Batista’s regime “to
the wall,” and his indeterminate ideology, his instinctive defiance, and
his gargantuan ambition posed serious risks.
And so the C.I.A. sought to put more eyes and ears around Castro, eventually assigning him the cryptonym AMTHUG.
Morgan must have seemed like a tantalizing target for recruitment. He
had a built-in cover and access, spoke Spanish, and, as a U.S. citizen,
seemed easier to turn: he would not have to become a traitor to his
country. Morgan’s support for Castro and the revolution presented an
impediment, but, as any seasoned case officer knew, virtually everyone
had a “soft spot”: greed, jealousy, sexual temptation. One simply needed
to find the spot and inflame it, until the target breached a system of
beliefs for a system of information, for silent calls and dead drops.
It
seemed that Morgan had a spark of resentment that could catch fire.
Castro, wary of rivals, had denied prominent government positions to
many members of the Second National Front of the Escambray, including
Menoyo. Adam Clayton Powell, a congressman from New York, had just
returned from a fact-finding mission in Cuba, where he had overheard
Morgan—whom he described as “a sweet guy, but very tough”—criticizing
the new regime.
At the Hotel Capri, Cherne was surprised to find
that Morgan occupied a small, sparely furnished room. Rodríguez had gone
out, but armed barbudos—bearded guerrillas—kept entering and
exiting, as if the cramped room were a makeshift headquarters. Morgan
wore his rebel uniform, the star of a comandante emblazoned on each epaulet. His revolver rested on a dresser.
Cherne
told Morgan that he had sought him out to promote the I.R.C.’s work in
Cuba and to obtain an audience with Castro, but Morgan was wary. He knew
that Havana had become a city of spooks, and Cherne had shown him an
I.R.C. brochure featuring William Joseph (Wild Bill) Donovan—the famous
spymaster of the Second World War, who was an honorary chairman of the
committee’s board. Morgan suspected that Cherne was an American
intelligence officer representing “very substantial and powerful
forces.”
As they conferred, Morgan, perhaps believing that his
secrets would be safe with a professional keeper of them, confessed
something that he had not revealed even to his closest friends,
including Menoyo. Morgan admitted that the story he had told about an
American friend being killed by Batista was a fabrication—a sleight of
hand that had allowed him to sneak himself into the narrative of
history. “Morgan told the truth, trusting that I would not take it
public,” Cherne recalled. Morgan touched on his troubled past, and
Cherne believed that Morgan was “courageous, tough, able, resourceful
but a bad boy. . . . And it was this bad boy who found in the developing
events in Cuba something exciting.”
Cherne observed how well
Morgan spoke Spanish, how he commanded respect from the rebels passing
through the room, and how bright he seemed, despite having only an
eighth-grade education. “I’ve rarely met a person as genuinely
articulate, as clever, in some ways brilliant, as I found him to be, all
by instinct,” Cherne noted.
He soon returned to the Capri for another meeting. This time, a barbudo lay
sprawled on the bed, apparently dozing. Morgan, even then the
loose-lipped Gabby, said that he wanted to disclose something “very
important.”
Cherne looked around anxiously, and asked, “How do you know the room is secure?”
Morgan
assured him that it was, but Cherne pointed to an air-conditioning
vent, where a bug might be installed. “I must apologize,” Morgan said.
“You are absolutely right.” He picked up a transistor radio, placed it
in front of the vent, and cranked up the music.
Cherne was still
concerned about the Cuban on the bed. Morgan’s “blithe willingness to
take risks was not altogether to my taste,” Cherne recalled. But,
sensing that Morgan had “irresistible” information, he let him proceed
and, with his permission, even used a miniature recording device that he
had brought with him. Morgan confided that Guevara and Raúl Castro were
Marxist-Leninists who threatened the revolution. Guevara had enlisted
someone to kill him, but Morgan had captured the agent and, before
letting him go, obtained a written confession, which he had stashed
away. “That is the insurance policy which will keep me alive,” Morgan
claimed.
Cherne asked Morgan if he thought that Fidel Castro was a
Communist. Morgan said no and emphasized that many Cubans were
committed to democracy. Cherne found Morgan’s tale of intrigue “filled
with perceptive fact.”
Morgan expressed the hope that Cherne
could use his influence to secure foreign economic aid for some three
thousand families in the Escambray who had been “bombed out” during the
war. And he said he was worried that the U.S. government would revoke
his citizenship, as some anti-Castro elements were clamoring for. Cherne
suspected that he had pinpointed Morgan’s soft spot: the Yankee comandante
wanted to make sure that, if things grew too dangerous, he could return
to America with his family; he feared being left out in the cold.
Cherne
believed that Morgan was not seeking personal advantage. Rather, Morgan
was hoping to “even the score” with his beloved country, where he had
fallen short as a citizen and a soldier. “This was his act of
expiation,” Cherne concluded.
Morgan handed Cherne a 1946
five-centavo coin. Its edge had a small notch. If Cherne wanted to send
someone to see him in the future, he should give that person the coin
for presentation to Morgan—a sign of trustworthiness.
After Cherne
left the hotel, with the coin and the recording of their conversation
tucked away, he grew anxious that he had been spied upon. Why had he
taken such a foolish risk? Cherne scribbled on paper what he had
learned, put it in an envelope, and slipped it to a trusted friend in
Havana. “Just in case I didn’t get out,” he recalled.
Cherne
returned to his hotel and remained in his room. The phone rang, but he
did not answer it. “I heard footsteps outside my door, and I sweated
freely,” he recalled. Finally, he rushed to the airport, waited an
“interminable period,” and “wasn’t relieved until the plane took off.”
On
March 20th, Cherne went to C.I.A. headquarters—then a complex of shabby
buildings on E Street, in Northwest Washington, D.C. A sign saying
“U.S. Government Printing Office” had once hung out front, but, after
President Eisenhower and his driver struggled to find the entrance, it
was replaced with the C.I.A.’s emblem.
Cherne was ushered through
security and into the French Room, a conference space used by senior
C.I.A. officials, where he met with the acting chief of the Western
Hemisphere Division. Cherne debriefed him about his encounter with
Morgan, which he considered one of the “most incredible and fascinating
accidental exposures to political reality in my entire life.” The C.I.A.
cultivates its own private language, and Cherne, who was identified in a
classified document about Morgan simply as “HQS contact,” was serving
as a spotter—someone who identifies a potential asset for recruitment.
Cherne told the C.I.A. that Morgan could be very valuable, as he was on
excellent terms with Castro. And Cherne passed on Morgan’s coin—the kind
of object that the magician Mulholland called a “recognition signal.”
A C.I.A. report concluded that Morgan had “KUCAGE
possibilities.” In his 1975 book, “Inside the Company,” Philip Agee, a
former C.I.A. officer who turned against the agency and allegedly
assisted Castro’s regime, revealed that KUCAGE stood for
highly sensitive psychological and paramilitary operations. “They are
action rather than collection activities,” Agee wrote. “Collection
operations should be invisible so that the target will be unaware of
them. Action operations, on the other hand, always produce a visible
effect. This, however, should never be attributable to the C.I.A. or to
the U.S. government.”
Not long after Castro took power, the C.I.A.
began to seek out action operators who could press the “magic button”:
assassination. In addition to commissioning Mulholland’s manuals, the
C.I.A. had created a document titled “A Study of Assassination.” After
noting that the “morally squeamish should not attempt it,” the study
laid out various techniques:
The most efficient accident . . . is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. . . . The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [lifting] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. . . . The subject may be stunned or drugged and then placed in the car, but this is only reliable when the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation.
At the end of March, the C.I.A. authorized a background investigation of Morgan—“a.k.a. ‘El Americano.’
” Its agents needed more “biographical data” before trying to recruit
Morgan. On March 30th, the agency’s Central Cover Division requested
that it be advised immediately when Morgan had been “activated.”
Two
weeks later, Castro arrived in Washington, D.C., on what he billed as a
“good will” tour. President Eisenhower declined to meet with him, but,
when Castro appeared in public, wearing his rumpled green fatigues and
empty pistol holster, he was cheered by Americans who saw him as a folk
hero. “Viva Castro!” they shouted.
Around this time, as
Aran Shetterly, the biographer, recounts, another curious guest appeared
at the Hotel Capri. He was a reputed bagman for the Mob named Frank
Nelson. The Mob feared, correctly, that Castro planned to shutter its
casinos and night clubs. (“We are not only disposed to deport the
gangsters, but to shoot them,” Castro later proclaimed.)
Nelson said that a friend in Miami was interested in Morgan’s “services.”
“In my services?” Morgan asked, confused.
It
was Nelson’s turn to look around the room nervously. In a hushed voice,
he said, “My friend is ready to pay you well if you help him.” He
paused. “A million dollars.”
The conversation continued in Miami,
where Morgan met in a secure hotel room with Nelson’s “friend.” It was
the Dominican Republic’s consul there, who was serving as yet another
go-between, in order to conceal the true identity of the plotters. One
of the masterminds was Rafael Trujillo, the tyrant who had ruled the
Dominican Republic for three decades, and who was even more sadistic
than Batista. His security chief likened his rule to that of “Caligula,
the mad Caesar.”
One of Trujillo’s maxims was “He who does not
know how to deceive does not know how to rule,” and he had a penchant
for scheming to kill his opponents abroad. In 1956, Trujillo allegedly
orchestrated the kidnapping, in New York, of a lecturer at Columbia
University who had served in the Trujillo government, and was about to
publish a doctoral thesis critical of the regime. After being taken back
to the Dominican Republic and delivered to Trujillo, the scholar was
believed to have been stripped naked, tied to a rope on a pulley, then
lowered, slowly, into a vat of boiling water. Now Trujillo wanted to
eliminate Fidel Castro.
In the hotel room in Miami, Trujillo’s
consul was joined by Batista’s former chief of police. (Batista, still
in the Dominican Republic, was helping to bankroll the operation.) Also
present was a broad-chested, dapper man whom Morgan recognized from his
days in organized crime: Dominick Bartone. After the revolution, the
gangster had sought out Morgan, trying to sell the Castro regime several
Globemaster military cargo airplanes. Bartone was now trying to sell
the planes to the plotters seeking to overthrow Castro. Bartone’s ally
Jimmy Hoffa had allegedly attempted to siphon three hundred thousand
dollars from the Teamsters’ pension fund to float the deal. One of
Hoffa’s aides later informed the government that the scheme “was purely
and simply Hoffa’s way of helping some of his Mob buddies who were
afraid of losing their businesses in Cuba.”
The men in the hotel
room represented interests tied to the Mob, the Teamsters, Batista, and
Trujillo, a longtime ally of the United States. These divergent lethal
forces had found coherence in a single audacious plot.
As they
tried to persuade Morgan, they, too, probed for his soft spot. “I
understand that you and your people have been treated badly,” Nelson had
said in his pitch. “Besides, a million dollars is always a million
dollars.”
To the rest of the world, Morgan might have become the Yankee comandante. But the plotters were confident that, deep down, he was still good ol’ Billy Morgan.
“We’ll give you everything you ask for,” Batista’s former police chief said.
Morgan
soon got back to them. He let them know that he had consulted with
Menoyo, and that they had given careful thought to what had happened in
Cuba since the revolution. And Morgan said that he, along with members
of the Second Front, was ready to join the conspiracy.
Hoover
sensed that something was afoot. There were reports from informants
that, in recent months, Morgan had received tens of thousands of dollars
from the Dominican consul, the cash often stuffed in “common paper
bags.” There were whispers that Morgan, who had moved with Rodríguez
into a house in Havana, was being ferried messages from a priest acting
in the interest not of God but of Rafael Trujillo. And there were rumors
that, in Florida, Morgan had met with Johnny Abbes García, the head of
Trujillo’s secret police, who was a master at extracting information (he
had studied Chinese methods of torture) and at concealing it (he
reputedly had an affair with Trujillo’s half brother). “JOHNNY went to Miami to make contact with MORGAN,” an F.B.I. report said, adding that Abbes García and his bodyguard had “a good time in a calypso nightclub.”
Hoover
and his men tried to detect a hidden design in the data they were
collecting. They were witnessing history without the clarity of
hindsight or narrative, and it was like peering through a windshield
lashed with rain. As Hoover confronted the gaps in his knowledge, he
became more and more obsessed with Morgan. A former fire-eater at the
circus! Hoover hounded his evidence men to “expedite” their inquiries,
homing in on Morgan’s ties to Dominick Bartone. The mobster, whom the
bureau classified as “armed and dangerous,” had recently been arrested
with his associates at Miami International Airport, where they had been
caught loading a plane with thousands of pounds of weapons—a shipment
apparently destined for mercenaries and Cuban exiles being trained in
the Dominican Republic.
The incident had not only intensified
Hoover’s scrutiny of Morgan and the plotters; it also aroused the
interest of the Senate Rackets Committee and its chief counsel, Robert
F. Kennedy, who was investigating links between Hoffa’s Teamsters and
organized crime. At a hearing in June, 1959, Kennedy demanded, “Do we
have any background on Mr. Morgan?”
When a Teamster official was
questioned by the committee about the weapons scheme, he said, more than
once, “I decline to answer because I honestly believe my answer may
tend to incriminate me.” Another witness, however, acknowledged that
Morgan had “worked for Bartone in years past.”
While the F.B.I.
tracked Morgan’s movements, he made repeated forays to Miami, where he
met with his conspirators. That summer, he also travelled to Toledo for a
visit with his mother and father, whom he had not seen since leaving
for Cuba, a year and a half earlier. His parents savored the brief
reunion, but they could tell that Morgan was feeling “heat and
pressure,” as he later put it. When his mother looked at his clothing
and belongings, she noticed that there wasn’t any identification on
him—he’d become a man from nowhere.
She asked him what kind of trouble he was getting into now.
Nothing, he assured her.
But she sensed that he was planning to pull off, as she later put it, yet another “trick.”
The
hand is not “quicker than the eye,” Mulholland warned in his spy
manuals. The key to an illusion is to make the audience explain away the
fact that it has been deceived in plain sight.
On July 27, 1959,
Morgan flew again to Miami, this time with Rodríguez. Eight months
pregnant, she provided some cover. Still, Morgan was stopped by
authorities at the airport in Miami and taken to a holding room, where
he was confronted by two men with close-cropped hair, dark suits, and
dark ties: Hoover’s agents.
After apprising Morgan of his rights,
the agents pressed him about why he had come to Miami. He insisted that
he was there to have fun with his wife for a few days, but, under
further questioning, he admitted that a representative of a foreign
government had contacted him about leading a counter-revolution in Cuba.
“Subject refused to identify the individuals with whom he was in
contact,” the agents wrote in a report.
Morgan said that he was
in a “precarious position.” The agents eventually let him go, but Hoover
ordered his men to monitor Morgan’s movements by “employing physical
surveillances and utilizing other confidential techniques.” The F.B.I.
reported that “subject’s pregnant wife was seen being driven from the
Montmartre Hotel in a 1959 blue Cadillac.”
The agents traced the car: it
belonged to Dominick Bartone.
On July 31st, Morgan phoned the
F.B.I., letting its agents know that Rodríguez had returned to Cuba. He
said that he planned to go back himself, on a Pan American flight, in
two days. Within hours of the call, though, he took off, leaving his
belongings in his hotel room. The agents tried to pick up his trail, but
he had vanished.
On the night of August 6th, the F.B.I.
subsequently learned, Morgan boarded a small fishing vessel, in a
“clandestine manner,” and rendezvoused off the coast of Miami with a
fifty-four-foot yacht manned by two mercenaries. The vessel was stripped
of any name or registration number, and was loaded with machine guns,
explosives, and other armaments. With Morgan aboard, the yacht set off
for Cuba and, after eluding the U.S. Coast Guard and nearly running out
of fuel, slipped into Havana Harbor, on August 8th.
Hoover
believed that he was worming his way inside the conspiracy. One F.B.I.
source reported that Morgan was planning to “assassinate Castro.”
Another said that the plot was to take out Fidel and Raúl Castro.
According to multiple sources, a strike force of nearly a thousand
Cuban exiles and mercenaries would be transported, by plane, from a base
in the Dominican Republic to Trinidad, a colonial town at the foot of
the Escambray Mountains. Once these forces landed, it was believed, they
would be led by Morgan, whom a cable from the U.S. Embassy described as
“an enigma.”
Morgan had received from Trujillo a shortwave
radio—a bulky contraption with dozens of thick black dials. Morgan set
it up on a wooden desk in his house, and after turning the dials he
heard the scratchy sound of a voice: Trujillo’s killer spy, Abbes
García, in the Dominican Republic.
An informant later told the
F.B.I. that Abbes García operated his radio every evening after
midnight, and often identified himself by saying, “This is the Red Cow.”
Morgan was given the code name Henry—a reference to Henry
Morgan, the seventeenth-century Welsh privateer, who had been
commissioned by the English crown to plunder gold from Cuba, then a
Spanish colony. Once, when Henry Morgan found himself trapped by a
Spanish armada, he floated toward the enemy a ship, rigged with
incendiary materials and wooden dummies, which then exploded, allowing
him to escape, in one of the greatest ruses in seafaring history.
William Morgan flicked on the shortwave radio late one August night. “Henry speaking,” he said. “Come in . . . Come in . . . ”
The Red Cow picked up his signal, and Morgan told him that the plot had begun. “Our troops are advancing,” he said.
Abbes García could hear bombs and gunfire in the background.
“Forward, Henry!” came the jubilant reply.
Hoover
and other high-level officials at the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Navy, the
Army, the Air Force, and the State Department circulated intelligence
about Morgan and his plot. Urgent wire reports were issued: “Fidel’s
home in Cojimar shot . . . Reliable sources state small group attacked
Raúl’s home . . . Whereabouts Morgan not known . . . Telephone
communications to Las Villas and Camagüey provinces cut . . . Rumors of
fighting . . . Armed services on full alert . . . Expecting something
further, probably invasion . . . Havana Harbor will be bombed at 4:00
a.m. . . . It is expected that Castro will be finished.”
Hoover
and his colleagues picked up intelligence that Morgan and other members
of the Second Front, including Menoyo and Jesús Carreras, had gathered
in Trinidad, where they had secured a muddy airstrip, effectively
cutting the island in two. Trujillo was heard broadcasting a message to
the Cuban people, saying, “Fire, fire, fire to that demon Fidel Castro
and his brother Raúl!” Trujillo began to air-drop dozens of crates of
.50-calibre ammunition to Morgan and his followers, the billowing white
parachutes seesawing down from the clouds. When another supply plane
returned, its crew reported seeing lit bombs tracing paths across the
night sky, as if there were an electrical storm. On August 12th, Morgan,
who had brought the shortwave radio with him, spoke to Trujillo, and
told him that his forces had captured the town. “Trinidad is ours!”
Morgan said. “Don’t let us down.”
The following evening—Castro’s
thirty-third birthday—Trujillo dispatched to Cuba a plane carrying the
first members of the strike force. As the soldiers disembarked at the
airstrip in Trinidad, which had been marked with lights, they could hear
Morgan and his men shouting denunciations of Castro, and, as they
joined in, the cries grew louder and more intense, converging, like
voices at a stadium, in a deafening incantation: “DEATH TO CASTRO!”
Then
a towering, bearded figure, who had also been chanting, emerged from
where he was hiding, under a mango tree. It was Fidel Castro.
Morgan
had pulled off a trick within a trick. He was not a
counter-revolutionary—he was a double agent. He and the Second Front had
been colluding with Castro; the radio messages, the cutting of
communications, and the exploding bombs had all been part of the
stagecraft of what Morgan described as a “fictitious war.”
Morgan and Olga Rodriguez in 1958.
Morgan
and those loyal to Castro pointed machine guns at the stunned fighters
from the strike force. One of Trujillo’s men later said, “I should not
be judged as a conspirator, but as an imbecile.” Soldiers from the
strike force drew their guns, and for a moment the plotters and the
counter-plotters peered at one another, as if still puzzling over who
had crossed whom. Then a few of Trujillo’s men opened fire, and everyone
began shooting. One of Morgan’s friends ran toward the plane and was
killed. By the time the fusillade ended, two members of the strike force
had died, and the rest had been apprehended.
Morgan had helped
break the first major counter-revolutionary plot against the Castro
regime. Later, during a five-hour televised address that lasted until
three in the morning, Castro explained what had happened. Morgan,
smiling and wearing his crisp rebel uniform, appeared beside him. During
the previous few months, he and Castro had spent hours scheming. Castro
was seen draping his long arm around Morgan, his prized double agent.
He hailed Morgan as a “Cuban,” and Morgan referred to Castro as his
“faithful friend.” Menoyo recalls, “They had complete trust in one
another.”
The Yankee comandante revealed to the public
that, after being approached to lead the counter-revolution, he and
Menoyo had alerted Castro, who directed them to draw out their enemies.
Castro said in his televised address, “Everyone played his assigned
parts. It was better than a movie.” Herbert Matthews, in a letter to
Hemingway, described the events as “stranger than fiction but real.”
Morgan
and Menoyo had been so convincing in their roles as
counter-revolutionaries that Leo Cherne, and others, suspected that they
had originally been part of the conspiracy, switching sides only when
they were about to be discovered. But, according to Menoyo and others
involved in the scheme, they had not turned against Castro—who remained
revered in Cuba, and who had reaffirmed his support of democratic
principles during his April visit to Washington. Despite Morgan’s
concerns about the Castro regime, he stated emphatically that he and
members of the Second Front would “never unite” with brutes like
Trujillo or Batista.
On August 20th, Morgan called the F.B.I.
agents who had pursued him in Miami, and apologized for not having been
more forthcoming. He explained that he had not wanted to “sell out
Cuba,” where he had many friends. He added that he didn’t think that he
had broken any American laws, though he might have “bent” them slightly.
The
Secret Service launched an investigation of Morgan and recommended that
no action be taken against this man of “unquestioned courage,” given
that he posed no threat to “the safety and welfare of our President.”
But Hoover fumed over the deception, and in September the State
Department stripped Morgan of his citizenship.
The C.I.A. made no
effort to intercede on Morgan’s behalf. That May, according to
declassified documents, the agency had cancelled its effort to recruit
him, after a background check turned up evidence of his criminal youth
and his scandalous military record. An internal memorandum had noted,
“Station strongly feels any covert arrangement with Morgan undesirable
from security standpoint.” In the end, the authentic nature of Morgan’s
rebelliousness made him too unpredictable: better to deal with someone
simply looking for a score.
Trujillo—who was later assassinated
in a C.I.A.-assisted plot—placed a half-million-dollar bounty on
Morgan’s head. When Clete Roberts, the American broadcaster, visited
Morgan’s house, in September, 1959, he found it surrounded by bodyguards
with Thompson submachine guns. “I ought to tell you back in the United
States that Mr. Morgan and I are sitting in what you might call an armed
camp,” Roberts said. He asked Morgan, “How does it feel to have a
half-million-dollar price on your head?”
Morgan replied coolly, “Well, it isn’t too bad. They are going to have to collect it. And that’s going to be hard.”
The
Castro government made Morgan a Cuban “citizen by birth” and promised
to protect him. The Associated Press wrote that he had obtained “almost
legendary stature” on the island, and Cherne said that he had become
“the hero of the republic.” Morgan further bolstered his reputation when
he handed over to the Cuban government seventy-eight thousand dollars
that he had received from the Dominican consul, asking that the money be
invested in economic development in the Escambray region. When Morgan
walked along the streets of Havana, people reached out to touch him;
there was even a popular song celebrating his exploits.
In August,
Rodríguez gave birth to a daughter, who was named for Morgan’s mother,
Loretta. Rodríguez recalls that Castro showed up at the clinic to
congratulate her and Morgan. “He wanted to be the godfather,” Rodríguez
says, though the honor went to Menoyo.
Morgan was astonished that
so many Cubans had embraced him. “These are people who never saw me
before in their lives,” he told Roberts. “They never knew me. They just
know me by what I’ve done or how I’ve been with them.”
He said
that the revolution had been fought for a beautiful idea—freedom—and
that he was not willing to abandon the promises that he had made in the
mountains. Though a few Marxist-Leninists had tried to “sneak” into
power amid the turmoil in the country, he said, the Cuban people were
too individualistic to accept such a system. “Communism breeds on
ignorance and poverty,” he said. “And the first thing that the
revolution is doing is creating schools and creating jobs and creating
homes and giving people land in which they can increase their income.”
He acknowledged that many of Cuba’s revolutionaries were young and
inexperienced, and had made mistakes; but their main political aim
remained helping “the little guy.”
Though Morgan was anguished
over losing his American citizenship—“The greatest thing that ever
happened to me was to have been born in the United States,” he once
said—he was content with his growing family, and was eager to help build
a new Cuban society. “I’m a Cuban now,” he said. “And I believe in the
revolution.” Or, as he later put it, “I am betting my life that the
revolution succeeds.”
THEY’RE GONNA GET YOU!
Morgan
did not take a post in the Castro government, saying, “I’ve never been a
politician—I’m a soldier.” But he remained an adventurer, and in the
fall of 1959 he set up a bold experiment in Cuba’s swamps, under the
auspices of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform. Earning a small
monthly salary, he built several nurseries, including one in the
Escambray, that bred bullfrogs for their tender meat and valuable skins,
which could be used to make wallets and belts and purses.
Morgan
began with a few frogs, but they quickly multiplied, the tadpoles
becoming stout creatures that, with their legs extended, were as long as
a foot. The nurseries were soon filled with a mass of croaking
creatures devouring, whole, virtually anything they could swallow—bugs,
fish, mice, even other frogs—the wild proliferation continuing until
Morgan presided over a kingdom of more than half a million frogs. It was
like the story of Exodus that he had read as a child: “And the
magicians did so with their enchantments, and brought up frogs upon the
land of Egypt.”
Morgan often worked eighteen-hour days, digging a
network of shaded trenches to accommodate his ever-growing stock. The
Cuban press hailed Morgan’s project as a “miracle,” and when a reporter
asked him if he had used architectural diagrams to lay out the farms he
replied, “Blueprints, your ass. I dug those fucking ditches.”
He
hired hundreds of peasants to operate the farms, delivering the kind of
economic opportunity that he and the rebels had promised during the
revolution. Viola June Cobb, an American who had worked as a secretary
for Fidel Castro, later testified secretly before a Senate subcommittee,
and said that Morgan was “a boy with ideals” who had a “tremendous
desire to be helpful,” and that through his farms he had improved the
lives of some two thousand peasants. “The ones I had seen in rags and
barefoot now were wearing shoes and stockings, looking decent,” she
said.
Dignitaries and reporters travelled to the swamps to see the famed Yankee comandante and double agent. An article in Time
called him the “Improbable Frogman.” Morgan projected his usual buoyant
self. “Cuban frogs’ legs are tops,” he’d say. Or “Cuba shipped a
million dollars’ worth of frogs’ legs to the U.S. last year. I’m going
to double that.”
On July 31, 1960, Rodríguez gave birth to a
second girl, Olguita. Before Morgan came to Cuba, he had been a
neglectful father, and he regretted it. He had sent a letter to Anne,
his daughter from his second marriage, who was now five:
When I saw you last you were just a little tyke. . . . You use to sit in the window and when you saw my car drive in you would say—Daddy Daddy. . . . And I know when I did not come home any more I know you missed me and looked out the window for your dad—this was a long time ago baby and possibly you don’t remember—but I do—And always will.
Morgan now doted on his baby girls, having concluded that a man who has “his family is probably the happiest person in the world.” In a debriefing by the C.I.A., a reporter said of Morgan, “He seemed happy and secure.”
But,
after foiling the Trujillo conspiracy and helping to save the
revolution, he grew increasingly uneasy with the political forces that
he had helped to unleash. Morgan had predicted to the F.B.I. that the
influence of radicals, such as Guevara and Raúl Castro, would diminish
in Cuba. But Fidel had placed Raúl in charge of the armed forces, and
appointed as head of the national bank Guevara, who pushed for increased
state control over the economy.
On October 19th, Huber Matos, a
heralded rebel commander, resigned from the government, protesting the
growing influence of Communists. In a letter to Fidel Castro, he wrote,
“Please, in the names of our fallen comrades, of our mothers, of all the
people, Fidel, do not bury the revolution.” Two days later, Matos was
arrested. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
Earlier
that year, in March, the White House had approved a top-secret plan to
topple the Castro regime. The operation came to eerily resemble the
Trujillo conspiracy. A brigade of more than a thousand Cuban exiles—this
time secretly trained by the U.S., at a base in Guatemala—would invade
by sea, landing at a beach in the town of Trinidad. B-26 bombers would
preëmptively strike Castro’s Air Force to protect the brigade, which, if
necessary, could escape into the Escambray Mountains. It was the most
ambitious covert operation in U.S. history. At a White House meeting,
President Eisenhower told the plan’s architects, “Everyone must be
prepared to swear that he has not heard of it.”
That summer,
while preparations for an invasion were under way, the C.I.A. pushed the
magic button. In another echo of the Trujillo plot, the agency turned
to members of the Mafia, including an associate of Lansky’s, to
assassinate Castro. Various stratagems were considered, including
blowing Castro’s head off with an exploding cigar, jabbing him with a
poison-filled Paper Mate pen, and contaminating a diving suit with
tuberculosis germs.
Amid this blur of plots and counter-plots,
Morgan struggled to find clarity. No longer close with Castro, he could
not tell if the Cuban leader was reacting to provocations from
Washington, or if he was being undermined by more radical elements in
the government, or if he was revealing that, beneath his rebel garb, he
was just another dictator, willing to grasp any ideology that would
consolidate his power.
One day, members of the Communist Party
tried to organize a meeting on one of Morgan’s farms. He expelled them,
saying, “Fidel and Raúl know that I’m against the Communists.”
A
friend of Morgan’s from the Second Front recalls, “I said to William,
‘You have to be careful. You’re talking too much.’ But William loved to
talk.”
In April, 1960, a reporter observed of
Morgan, “Behind the bravado one senses confusion, regret, anxiety over
what lies ahead.” In Havana, Morgan’s house had been shot at more than
once—perhaps by agents of Trujillo or perhaps by an unknown enemy. “One
time, they killed our dog,” Rodríguez recalls. Afterward, Morgan moved
the family into an apartment building protected by more than a dozen
guards, many of whom lived with them. “It always seemed that we could
never be alone,” he once said to Rodríguez.
An informant told the
C.I.A. that Morgan’s “every move was being watched by the Cuban
military.” Rodríguez suspected that two of the bodyguards living with
them were spying for the G-2, Castro’s military-intelligence service. “I
wanted them out,” she recalls. But Morgan did not wish to be disloyal.
In this sense, Morgan was not a classic double agent, for he was someone
who wanted to believe. “He always trusted people,” Rodríguez
says. Still, he took precautions, choosing his own driver, and going to
work in a blue Oldsmobile outfitted with two submachine guns and a glove
compartment stuffed with grenades.
Morgan had no desire to flee
Cuba. As he later told his mother, “It would have been necessary to be a
traitor to myself, my friends and my beliefs.” He continued tending to
his frogs, with their deafening chorus.
One day, Morgan learned
that his rebel comrade Jesús Carreras, now an antagonist of the regime,
had been picked up by state security, in Santa Clara. Morgan raced to
the military barracks there, and demanded that the guards release
Carreras. “I’m a comandante!”
Morgan shouted, pointing to his star. The guards complied, and Morgan escorted Carreras away, mindful of the warning that another rebel colleague had given him: “Watch out! They’re gonna get you!”
Morgan shouted, pointing to his star. The guards complied, and Morgan escorted Carreras away, mindful of the warning that another rebel colleague had given him: “Watch out! They’re gonna get you!”
Morgan considered seeking political asylum
for his family. But he had confessed to one reporter, “I’ve run out of
countries,” and noted to another that “a guy in the middle can so easily
get caught.”
Cuba’s drift toward Communism continued, and several
of Morgan’s friends returned to the Escambray, to take up arms against
the regime. As Michael D. Sallah reported a decade ago, in an
illuminating account in the Toledo Blade, Morgan started to have
weapons smuggled into the mountains in the fall of 1960. “Every week,
trucks would carry them up,” a worker told me. Once, Morgan was planning
to take a shipment to a hideout himself, but Rodríguez said that it was
too dangerous. Everyone will recognize you, she said, insisting on
transporting the weapons herself. “We had an argument,” she recalls.
Rodríguez prevailed, and this time it was Morgan who anxiously waited at
home.
His opposition to the regime became more vocal. “If
anything happens to me, you’ll know the Commies have really taken over,”
he told one reporter, and said to another, “I don’t know how long I’m
going to last.”
Still, Viola Cobb, the secretary, says that Morgan
did not completely lose faith with Castro: “He had the idea that he was
standing by, and that when Fidel finally realized that the Communists
were taking over he would blow the whistle, and William Morgan and
Gutierrez Menoyo and some of the others would help him rescue the
country.”
On October 19th, two days after the Eisenhower
Administration recalled Philip Bonsal, its Ambassador to Cuba, presaging
the end of diplomatic ties, Morgan was summoned to a meeting at the
National Institute for Agrarian Reform. He brought a handbag made from
frog skin—a gift for the wife of one of the officials.
Rodríguez
and Morgan had plans that evening, but by seven o’clock he had not
returned home. “He was always punctual,” Rodríguez recalls. Her
premonitions coming back in a rush, she left the children with their
nanny and told Morgan’s driver to take her to the institute.
At the institute’s gate, she shouted at a guard, “Where’s William?”
“William had to go someplace,” he said.
“I need to see William. I have to see him.”
“William said you should come with us.”
The guards began encircling the car, and she told the driver, “Go! Go!”
They
sped away, returning home, but state-security guards soon barged
through the apartment door. “I’m the wife of Comandante Morgan,” she
said, trying to intimidate them. But they shoved her aside and searched
the apartment, terrifying the girls, one of whom was two months old, the
other fourteen months.
Rodríguez learned what had happened to
Morgan: upon entering the institute, he had been surrounded by state
security and taken to G-2 headquarters. Jesús Carreras had been rounded
up, too. Rodríguez had been right about the two bodyguards at the
apartment: they were spies.
Rodríguez could not get permission to
see Morgan, who had been placed in detention. According to an account
that Morgan wrote in prison, which was later smuggled out of the country
and obtained by the C.I.A., Cuban military-intelligence officials
interrogated him. “I said I would only talk to Fidel,” Morgan wrote. For
nearly a month, he was in solitary confinement. He became violently ill
and, fearing that the government was trying to poison him, made himself
vomit to purge any toxins.
After a month, he was moved to La
Cabaña, the prison overlooking Havana Harbor. Several times, he
discovered ground glass in his food. He still felt extremely sick, and
asked another prisoner if he had any medicine to “kill pain.” When the
man said yes, Morgan pleaded, “Shoot it into my arm.” He didn’t trust
the guards to do it. The man obtained a syringe from a prison doctor and
injected Morgan with the medicine.
In December, Menoyo, who says
that he had not participated in the smuggling of weapons into the
Escambray, visited Morgan at La Cabaña. “You are my chief and my
brother,” Morgan told him. Menoyo, who had lost both of his siblings to
war, replied, “You are my brother.” They embraced.
Not long
after Menoyo left the prison, he and a dozen members of the Second
Front fled the country, on three small fishing vessels, and headed for
America.
On December 31st, Rodríguez, who had been placed under
house arrest, was permitted to see her husband. Rats scurried in the
corners of the crowded meeting room. Though she did not want to upset
Morgan, she told him that she was being held prisoner in their home, and
that she had little water or food. “No one is allowed to visit,” she
said. “The babies are sick.”
Morgan urged her to flee—to get the
children out of Cuba before it was too late. “If you can, go to Toledo,”
he said. “My mother will help you.”
William and Olga Morgan with daughters Loretta and Olguita in 1960.
He took her hand.
“Everything’s going to be O.K.,” he said. But Rodríguez, who rarely
betrayed fear, was scared. “I was so worried about him and what would
happen to our baby girls,” she recalls. After five minutes, the guards
said that her time was up.
“I love you with every part of me,” he said. They stole a kiss before being separated.
That
night, when Rodríguez returned home, she crushed sleeping pills into
hot chocolate and offered the drink to the men guarding her. At two in
the morning, when all the guards appeared to be asleep, she gathered her
daughters. “Hush,” she whispered to them. When the baby began to cry,
she gave her a toy, and then, carrying both girls in her arms, she crept
out of the house. She went to the Brazilian Embassy, where she was
given sanctuary after telling the Ambassador and his wife, “Please, I’m
in big trouble.”
Morgan was also trying to break free. He studied
the design of La Cabaña and the routine of the guards, looking for a
flaw in the system. “Morgan had all kinds of escape plots,” another
prisoner later told the C.I.A. Morgan worked to regain his strength. A
press attaché at the U.S. Embassy later wrote, “Up at dawn, he would put
himself through calisthenics, then march around the compound, shouting
commands at himself.” The inmate who had given Morgan painkillers
recalled, “He exercised like an athlete and marched like a soldier.”
Morgan turned increasingly toward his Catholic faith. He wore a rosary
and often prayed.
Hiram González, a twenty-four-year-old
revolutionary who had been arrested for conspiring against the regime,
had just arrived at La Cabaña, and watched in despair as prisoners were
taken out and killed by firing squads, while birds swooped down to “peck
at the bits of bone, blood, and flesh.” Morgan, he recalls, tried to
cheer him up, offering his mattress. When Morgan found him crying in a
corner, he went up to him and said, “Chico, men don’t cry.”
“At times like this, I’m not a man.”
Morgan
put his hand on his shoulder. “If it helps your suffering, then it’s
O.K.” Morgan walked him around the prison yard until he felt better. “He
was the only one to help,” González recalls.
Two days later, on
March 9, 1961, guards seized Morgan and escorted him across the compound
to a room where a military tribunal was being held. Along the way,
Morgan, trying to summon courage, murmured song lyrics to himself: “Over
hill, over dale, we have hit the dusty trail / And those caissons go
rolling along.”
There were eleven other defendants at the
tribunal, including Carreras. Rodríguez was tried in absentia. A few
weeks earlier, Che Guevara had published an essay denouncing members of
the Second Front. “Revolutions, accelerated radical social changes, are
made of circumstances,” he wrote. “They are made of passions, of man’s
fight for social vindication, and are never perfect.” The mistake of the
Cuban Revolution, Guevara argued, was its accommodation of men like the
Second Front commanders. “By their presence, they showed us our sin—the
sin of compromise . . . in the face of the actual or potential traitor,
in the face of those weak in spirit, in the face of the coward.” He
went on, “Revolutionary conduct is the mirror of revolutionary faith,
and when someone calls himself a revolutionary and does not act as one,
he can be nothing more than heretical. Let them hang together.”
At
the trial, Morgan and Carreras were charged with conspiracy and
treason. Later, Fabián Escalante, who served for many years as the head
of Cuban counter-intelligence, detailed the case against Morgan,
claiming that he had been a longtime American intelligence operative—a
“chameleon”—who, in 1960, had attempted to “organize, for the C.I.A., a
band of counter-revolutionaries in the Escambray.”
Without a
doubt, the C.I.A. was trying to foment the new insurgency in the
mountains. But U.S. documents, which have since been declassified,
suggest that Morgan was never a C.I.A. operative. Indeed, an agency
memorandum dated October 5, 1960—two weeks before Morgan’s arrest—voiced
“strenuous objections” to the idea of using him. This followed an
inquiry by Army intelligence, which had concluded that enlisting Morgan
would be “extremely worthwhile.” (The Army had considered sending him a
“secret writing system”—most likely, one involving invisible ink.) After
Morgan’s arrest, an Army internal memo noted that Morgan had not become
a registered operative.
“William was never an American agent,” Menoyo says. “It is simply a lie by the Castro regime to justify its actions.”
At
the tribunal, Morgan complained that his lawyer had only just learned
of the charges against him. Morgan and Carreras, branded
pseudo-revolutionaries, faced death by firing squad.
The prisoner
who had given Morgan the painkillers recalled, “The whole prison was
agog with the news that Morgan and Carreras were actually going to stand
trial. Not even the most zealous of the young rebels believed that
Fidel Castro would shoot these two men, who had played such a big role
in the Cuban Revolution.”
Morgan denied that he had ever been a
foreign agent and said, “I have defended this revolution because I
believed in it.” He explained, “If I am found guilty, I will walk to the
execution wall with no escort, with moral strength, and with a clear
conscience.”
A young man in the back of the courtroom, ignoring
warnings by authorities, spoke out on Morgan’s behalf. It was the rebel
who had broken his foot in the Escambray. “William would not abandon
me,” he recalls.
The trial lasted little more than a day. A
defendant’s fate was usually signalled by which room he was taken to
before the verdict. “If you went to the right, you went into a copiea,
a little chapel-like room, and you knew you were going to get shot,” a
prisoner recalled. “For most prisoners, if you went to the left, you got
thirty years.”
Most of the defendants were led to the left.
Rodríguez, who was twenty-four, also received a thirty-year sentence.
Morgan, along with Carreras, was led to the right, and condemned to die
the next day. An American radio broadcaster at the trial told his
listeners that he had witnessed “a farce.”
Morgan asked to speak
one last time to his mother, but the request was denied. Morgan had
written Loretta a five-page letter on La Cabaña stationery—“the longest
letter I have ever written,” he told her. (The letter was recently
uncovered, by Michael Sallah.) Morgan understood that the very cause
that had helped save his life would likely lead to his death. “I have
been prepared for this as long as I have been in prison,” he wrote. “For
after all it is not when a man dies but how.”
Morgan knew that
he had to get the letter past government censors, so his criticisms of
Castro were oblique. “No man has a right to impose his will or beliefs
on others,” Morgan wrote. “I feel sorry for those who accuse me and who
are responsible for what will pass. They accuse with fear in their
hearts and ambition in their minds not knowing that good never comes of
evil.” Morgan was ready to give his life for Cuba: “The way of freedom
is hard—and the road is covered with the blood of those who must die so
that the rights of man can live.” He wanted to protect what he
considered sacred about the revolution, and believed that only in time
would a proper verdict be rendered on his life: “Humans leave their
actions to be judged by other people in the pages of history so it is
not what we do but the result of what we do that is finally judged.”
Morgan
went on, “I write these things as they run through my mind so that by
reading this you might better know what kind of man is your son. . . .
Raising a boy like me was not an easy task or did we always agree what
was the right thing to do. But I have always worshipped you and dad.” He
told his mother, “Don’t cry for me. I know that you understand. The
life of a man is in the hands of god and he calls when he is ready for
us. It is very few who are fortunate enough to have time to prepare to
meet him. If now is my time I will be ready and am looking at death not
with fear but with expectation. God bless you. . . . Until we meet
again, take care of Olga and the children.”
Loretta could not so
easily accept his fate, and launched a furious campaign to save him. She
enlisted the local office of the F.B.I. and contacted the White House,
which responded, “We fully understand and deeply sympathize with your
anxiety for your son.”
After Cuban officials denied Morgan’s
request to talk to his mother, he asked if he could say goodbye to
Rodríguez. Again, he was refused. So Morgan sent her a letter, knowing
that the only thing that could ever separate them was upon them. “As a
writer of love letters I am not so good,” he said. “To tell you that I
love you, it’s not sufficient, because words could never express my
feelings towards you. Since the first time I saw you in the mountains
until the last time I saw you in prison, you have been my love, my
happiness, my companion in life and in my thoughts during my moment of
death.” He regretted how little time they had spent together, and he
recalled the “beautiful plans” that they had made to settle in the
“mountains with the girls, living in peace and tranquility.”
He
tried to console her, assuring her that he was not afraid, and did not
consider death “an enemy.” Though some members of the Second Front had
vowed to retaliate if he was killed, Morgan told Rodríguez that he did
not want anyone to seek revenge on his behalf, not even against the
bodyguards who had betrayed him. “They are young and will have to fight
with their conscience,” he said. “I do not want blood spilled over my
cause. . . . It’s better that I die because I have defended lives. I
only ask that someday the truth will be known and that my daughters will
be proud of their father.” He told her, “I have great peace in my
spirit,” because at least she and the girls were safe.
In fact,
things were in tumult. A few days earlier, a distraught Rodríguez had
learned that several of their allies were planning a last-minute assault
on La Cabaña. In a kind of delirium, Rodríguez—who later cut her hair
short and dyed it black, as she had when she first went into the
mountains—told the wife of the Brazilian Ambassador that she needed to
leave for a few days. Protect my daughters until I return, she said. The
Ambassador’s wife, with whom she had grown close, pleaded with her not
to go. “I have to save William,” Rodríguez said. Carrying her .32, she
slipped into the trunk of a waiting car, and raced away.
Morgan,
meanwhile, was granted permission to see his girls, and one of
Rodríguez’s relatives brought them to La Cabaña. Morgan was briefly
allowed to talk to them, to hold them. Morgan told Rodríguez, in his
letter, “Let them know someday who their father was, and what my beliefs
and ideals were.” Earlier, he’d sent a note to Bill, his son from his
second marriage, who was now four. Saying that he could “speak from
experience, most of it hard,” Morgan told him, “Love your God—and Your
Country—and Stand Up for both,” adding, “And I know that your Country . .
. will Always be proud of you.” In his letter to Anne, he had said:
When
the time comes for you to get married and have a family of your own.
Pick a good man Baby—One with his head high but both feet on the
ground—And if you find one who wants to see the world—or dreams of
castles in the sky—let him see the world—honey—by himself—Possibly you
may never see this letter. But if you do, remember your dad was one of
those people—who saw the world—And its very hard for those who love such
a man.
Not long after
Rodríguez left the Brazilian Embassy, Castro’s forces smashed the plot
to liberate Morgan, killing or arresting many of the conspirators.
Rodríguez, meanwhile, sought refuge in a safe house, in Santa Clara.
Late
in the evening on March 11th, Carreras was taken before the firing
squad and shot. Five minutes afterward, Morgan—who had made his plea to
speak with Castro directly—was brought outside. Morgan prayed the whole
way, then removed the rosary around his neck and gave it to a priest,
asking that his mother receive it. As he had written her, “I leave a
love of God and country.”
Through the floodlights, Morgan peered
at the muzzles of the rifles. There was no longer any hope of escape. No
more castles in the sky.
According to a prisoner’s account, a voice in the distance shouted, “Kneel and beg for your life.”
It was the last thing that Morgan could control. “I kneel for no man,” he said.
One of the executioners shot him in the right knee. The Yankee comandante
tried to stay on his feet, blood spilling around him. Then he was shot
in the left knee. Finally, he collapsed, and was repeatedly shot in the
torso and head. His face, a witness said, was “blown off.”
“Many
of the men in the patio were crying,” the prisoner who had provided
medicine recalled. “The rumbling, that almost rose to the pitch of a
riot, was a tribute to William Morgan’s popularity.” Rodríguez,
sequestered in the safe house, did not yet know of her husband’s death,
but she felt a presence in her room. “I saw William,” she says. “I felt
him give me a kiss. No sound. Just the warmth of a kiss.”
Menoyo,
who learned of his friend’s death while being held at an immigration
detention center in McAllen, Texas, says, “It was like I lost a part of
me.”
When Morgan’s lawyer called Loretta to break the news, she
dropped the phone. Morgan’s daughter Anne, who was with her at the time,
says, “I remember my grandmother falling down on the floor, screaming
and crying. That is a memory I will never forget.”
After Morgan
was killed, Herbert Matthews sent Ernest Hemingway a letter. By then,
Matthews, who once claimed that he had “invented” Castro, had seen his
reputation collapse as his reporting on Cuba was exposed as gullible and
partisan. In his letter, he told Hemingway, “There were even some
pickets parading in front of the Times last Saturday bearing
placards against me.” Matthews was rattled by Castro’s decision to
execute Morgan. He reread the “very moving” statement that Morgan had
sent him from the mountains, and told Hemingway, “Here was an obviously
uneducated and very simple, tough guy who yet went to Cuba, as he says,
to fight for the American principles of freedom and against Communism.
He went on doing so for so long that he got himself executed.” Matthews
said that he thought Morgan’s saga was “like an Ernest Hemingway story,”
adding, “if anybody writes it, it should be you.”
On March 12th,
Rodríguez, still unaware that Morgan had been executed, got in a car
with a friend to go to another safe house, in Camagüey. State-security
vehicles suddenly surrounded them, and Rodríguez was taken to a prison
processing center, in Havana, where a sergeant greeted her as the “widow
of William Morgan.” With that, she knew. She lunged at the sergeant,
pounding him with her fists, then ran out to the street, through the
town, as the police gave chase; she kept running, not knowing where she
was going. “I ran for an hour,” she says, before the police caught her.
Rodríguez
was taken to La Cabaña, and forced to walk by the wall where Morgan had
been executed. Guards then took her to another prison, locking her in a
cell that had a hole in the floor for a latrine. Lizards crawled over
her at night. “The guards beat me with sticks,” she recalls. “Oh, God,
did they beat me.”
A month later, the newly
inaugurated U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, launched the invasion of
Cuba that had been approved by Eisenhower in 1960. Although America’s
role was evident, Kennedy hoped to maintain deniability, and so the
landing place was shifted from the town of Trinidad to the more remote
Bay of Pigs—a location that would reduce the “noise level” but that was
too far west to allow escape into the Escambray Mountains. At the last
moment, Kennedy also cancelled a second wave of air strikes, fearing
that they would betray direct U.S. involvement.
Soon after the
counter-revolutionary brigade landed on the beach, it was bombarded. The
commander sent out urgent messages over his shortwave radio to American
officials:
12:28 P.M.: Without jet air support cannot hold. Have no ammo left for tanks.
1:25 P.M.: Need air support immediately. Red Beach wiped out.
Late that evening, the commander said, “I have nothing left to fight with. . . . Farewell, friends!” The line went dead. The brigade was obliterated: a hundred and fourteen members killed, and more than a thousand captured. A C.I.A. operative said that, for the rest of his life, he would have regrets about what happened, but added, “That is the echo of anybody who’s ever tried to do anything in history.”
At
the outset of the Bay of Pigs attack, Castro declared, for the first
time, that Cuba was socialist. Philip Bonsal, the former Ambassador,
later said of Castro, “He cannot endure any sharing of authority. . . .
This drive for power is a far more constant element in his makeup than
is the philosophy behind any particular revolutionary panacea he may be
peddling. Castro has now attained his goal. Everything in Cuba hinges on
him. He holds his job at his own pleasure.”
Menoyo was released
from the Texas detention center. After writing to Morgan’s mother that
“William will be our eternal symbol until we will either win or perish,”
he went to Florida and founded Alpha 66, a paramilitary organization
aimed at overthrowing Castro. On December 28, 1964, Menoyo and three
members of the group boarded a boat in the Dominican Republic and landed
at the southeastern end of Cuba. After twenty-eight days on the run in
the mountains, Menoyo and his party were captured. When guards removed a
blindfold that they had made Menoyo wear, he recalls, he was standing
before Castro. “I knew you would come, but I also knew that I would
catch you,” Castro said. Menoyo was thrown into prison, vanishing along
with Rodríguez.
THE LAST FIGHT
One
day not long ago, while researching Morgan’s story, I went to Miami to
meet Rodríguez. An elegant woman in her mid-seventies, she had gray hair
and stooped shoulders that made her seem shorter than her five feet two
inches, but her face was still striking and she moved with steely
purpose, as if beating back a strong wind. “I still have the spirit of a
revolutionary,” she said.
After her arrest, in 1961, she spent a decade in prison. She had been a plantada,
meaning someone who was “rooted,” and had refused to take classes in
Marxism-Leninism or to be “rehabilitated” by the state. To protest the
treatment of prisoners, she went on several hunger strikes, her body
becoming an X-ray of itself, and she was often locked, virtually naked,
in solitary confinement, using newspapers to keep herself warm. She
read, under the faint light, the Biblical story of Job. The incessant
beatings by guards left one of her eyes impaired and her veins damaged.
Her daughters were raised by her parents, in Cuba, and their teachers
told them that their mother and father were traitors. “When you’re in
jail, it’s your family that hurts the most,” she said. The girls
suffered “great trauma.”
One of her daughters once visited her in prison and screamed at her, “You abandoned us!”
Recalling those years, Rodríguez says, “I no longer know how to cry, but I cry inside.”
William’s
mother, Loretta, had never met Rodríguez, but she campaigned for her
release, petitioning members of Congress and drawing support from the
clergy of the Catholic Church. In 1971, in response to mounting
international pressure, Rodríguez was released early from prison. Though
constantly followed by Cuba’s secret police, she tried to rebuild her
family. Eight years later, she and her daughters, by then grown and
married, arranged to fly to the United States, along with relatives. As
the group boarded the plane, officials seized Rodríguez, forcing her to
stay behind and pushing her to the edge of madness.
She continued
to try to get out. In 1980, Castro began the Mariel boat lift, allowing
many Cubans to leave for the U.S., among them criminals and mental
patients. Rodríguez claimed that she was a prostitute, but was
recognized by authorities and stopped. For a month, she slept in a tent
by the harbor. Finally, in August, as the last of the boats were about
to leave, an official told her, “You can go tonight.” Carrying only a
toothbrush and a comb, she got on a creaky, thirty-foot boat crammed
with passengers.
As the boat left the harbor, she heard a loud
crackling sound, like that of a firing squad. A Cuban Navy cutter was
firing at them. Bullets splintered the hull, and, as the boat slowly
began to sink, it seemed that Rodríguez’s life would end in a scene of
cosmic cruelty. Then she heard another sound: a helicopter from the U.S.
Coast Guard. Another boat was summoned, which rescued her and the other
passengers.
Upon reaching Florida—her mind filled with memories
of travelling there with Morgan during the Trujillo conspiracy, two
decades earlier—she bent down to the ground, overcome with emotion.
Taken to an immigration holding room, she told an American official, “I
am Olga, the widow of the Yankee comandante, William Alexander Morgan. I was a political prisoner.”
Rodríguez
was released, and she flew to Toledo. “I knew this is where I had to
be,” she says. She immediately went to see Loretta. “She wrapped me in
her arms, as if she were holding a part of William,” Rodríguez recalls.
Loretta, who had never much approved of William’s previous
relationships, told her, “I can see why my son loved you so.”
If
Rodríguez had lived with Morgan only in the present, she now seemed
imprisoned in the past. At every turn, she was forced to remember, or recordar—a word that derives from the Latin recordor, which means “to pass back through the heart.” Rodríguez often says, “The past is the past, but it’s always present.”
Rodríguez
learned that, a few years after Morgan was executed, his father died
from poor health, which some family members attributed to his grief.
Morgan’s son, from his second marriage, had also died, from uncertain
causes. His daughter Anne had been rebellious in her youth. “I know I
got that from my father,” she says. Her grandmother always wrote her on
the day that Morgan was executed, to keep “his memory alive inside me.”
Anne eventually married three times—“I’m an adventurous lady”—and had
two children. She has kept the final letter that Morgan sent her. “I
still cry when I read it,” she recalls. “That’s my daddy.”
Morgan,
in his final letter to Rodríguez, had begged her not to “let your life
become lifeless and sad. If you should find someone who you should love
and who respects you, marry him; because knowing that you are happy, I
will be also.” In 1985, Rodríguez married a welder in Toledo. “He is a
very good man,” she told me. She paused, then added, “What I had with
William was . . . ” She struggled to find the words in English, then
chose a Spanish phrase: “un gran amor.” A close friend of Rodríguez, Jon Richardson, told me, “She still loves William as if he’s just now coming up the mountain.”
For
more than two decades, Rodríguez, honoring a request from William’s
mother, who died in 1988, has waged what she calls her “last fight”: to
restore William’s U.S. citizenship and to retrieve his remains, so that
he can be laid to rest in his family’s plot, in Toledo—and finally come
in from the cold. “He did not deserve to die without a country,”
Rodríguez says.
The U.S. government has reinstated a person’s
citizenship only in rare instances, such as that of General Robert E.
Lee, and for years Rodríguez’s pleas were rebuffed. In 2005, she sent a
letter to President George W. Bush, saying, “Please Mr. President, may
God have you make the right decision. I beg of you.” Though she was
nearly seventy, she threatened to go on a hunger strike outside the
White House. “I’m ready,” she told the Miami Herald. “I can go a long time without eating. This time, it’s for William.”
In
2007, she received a letter from the State Department, acknowledging
that its original finding against Morgan could not be sustained. The
letter stated, “Mr. Morgan shall be deemed never to have relinquished
his U.S. nationality.”
Still, Rodríguez told me, she could not
rest until Morgan had been buried in America. In 2002, Marcy Kaptur, an
Ohio congresswoman, visited Cuba and received assurances from Castro
that Morgan’s remains could be retrieved from the Colón Cemetery, in
Havana, where he had been buried along with Carreras. Since then,
Rodríguez says, she has been stymied. In a bizarre twist, Cuban
officials claim that they cannot find Morgan’s bones.
“They are playing a
trick on me,” Rodríguez says.
She has received support for her
crusade from the aging, dwindling members of Alpha 66—though Menoyo is
now an outcast from the group. In 1986, after serving almost twenty-two
years in prison, during which he was repeatedly tortured, Menoyo went
into exile in Spain and renounced any efforts to use violence to
overthrow Castro. “When you are subjected to a policy of savagery and
barbarism, you come to the conclusion that you have to reject those
methods, that you have to be the first to set hatred aside, otherwise it
will destroy you,” he has said.
To the shock of Rodríguez and
many of his friends, Menoyo permanently returned to Cuba in 2003,
seeking reconciliation and a peaceful transformation. “The day I lose my
dreams,” he said, “I will be lost.” Although Rodríguez still speaks
fondly of Menoyo, many of his fellow-rebels now dismiss him as a
traitor.
Menoyo recently suffered an aneurysm, and when I last
spoke to him by phone his voice was faint, and he had only enough
strength to talk for a few minutes. He had watched Castro cling to power
until 2006, when he was eighty, only to hand the Presidency over to his
brother Raúl, who was seventy-five. Menoyo told me that he still hoped
to see “the end of this movie.” But he did not believe that the regime
would ever turn over Morgan’s bones. “Just the other day, Fidel was
going around and denouncing William, saying he worked for the C.I.A.,”
Menoyo said. He explained that, for the regime to address Rodríguez’s
request, it would have to confront the betrayal of the revolution.
Rodríguez,
however, has faith that she will prevail. When I met her in Miami,
where she had travelled from Ohio to attend a meeting of Alpha 66, she
said, “I can’t give up. If I have to, I will go to the cemetery and take
the bones myself.” She lit a cigarette, her mottled fingers trembling.
“William and I had so little time. We could never have the life we
dreamed of.” For a moment, she closed her eyes, as if holding back
tears. Then she said, “If I can do this for him, then we can both
finally have peace, and be free.” ♦
now people can be free.
No more 90-mile
trips to the Keys.
No more risking
your life for freedom.
I’m hoping he’s dead
because we don’t need him.
“Hasta Luego” (Goodbye)
“El tiempo tuyo ya pasó” (Your time has passed).
The father,
Silenced artist
Communist refugee
Underwear for a sail
To the Yankees he bailed
In a boat made of tires
Praying for his life
As he crashed onto land
"American citizen?"
My Cuban brother
On Mexican soil
Looking for an out
>From being communist
Fellow inner-tube riders
Mickey Mouse sailors
My bitchen dad
Became shark bait
Mexico set me free
During Castro's victory
I'm not "American"
Long live Mexico mother fucker!
Cuban government
Why such assholes
With no new ideas
Deal with it-or die!
Ya Se Acabo by Pitbull
It’s like a dream,now people can be free.
No more 90-mile
trips to the Keys.
No more risking
your life for freedom.
I’m hoping he’s dead
because we don’t need him.
“Hasta Luego” (Goodbye)
“El tiempo tuyo ya pasó” (Your time has passed).
The father,
Silenced artist
Communist refugee
Underwear for a sail
To the Yankees he bailed
In a boat made of tires
Praying for his life
As he crashed onto land
"American citizen?"
My Cuban brother
On Mexican soil
Looking for an out
>From being communist
Fellow inner-tube riders
Mickey Mouse sailors
My bitchen dad
Became shark bait
Mexico set me free
During Castro's victory
I'm not "American"
Long live Mexico mother fucker!
Cuban government
Why such assholes
With no new ideas
Deal with it-or die!
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