Читать книгу The Day John Fitzgerald Kennedy Past - Welby Thomas Cox Jr. - Страница 15

The Flight he had taken from Virginia arrived late, and Mick Flynt was concerned that his meeting with Ray Ray Beltray might be at risk. He knew Ray Ray had driven, so maybe, he'll be content to chill-out, get some shut-eye and wait him out at the gates to the farm, the CIA's secret training facility. It was unusual for these flights to be late, they operated military cover and where used mostly by the company with short-term business.

The Farm was known officially by the coded cryptonym, "Isometric” one of the thousands of codes managed by a secret society who maintained the code book. This group was a closed frat house. There were never any leaks, nor did the men selected ever leave for greener pastures unless carried on the shoulders by six team members. Camp Abe was the Farm, and the Farm was Isometric and Isometric was something else which led to a vault a thousand feet beneath Fort Knox.

Mick smiled at the guard and passed along his coded badge which revealed to the trained eye the level of his security clearance. Mick had been demoted as a result of the reprimand, shipped off to the floor crew and was issued a new badge which contained a new set of codes. Mick had always secretly wanted a home address with a single number maybe that would happen on his ID.

He found Ray Ray inside the gatehouse lounge where he had talked his way into a cup of coffee. His reputation had preceded him and he was entertaining the MP's with stories of declassified company activity. Ray Ray was dressed appropriately for military post and may have been taken for a Gunny if the colors had not been changed.

The two men waved good-bye to an obliging group of MP's and went to the training area where instructors were covering counter­intelligence and paramilitary arts. They sat on one of the four bleachers which encircled the training field and watched the competition by a small group in hand-to-hand combat. An instructor hooted and hollered to correct any flawed move which may one day save his life.

"We got a major break," Ray Ray started. "But things have stalled somewhat."

"Give it to me straight, I got some heat."

"I went down to New Orleans from the Denton meeting and had a good session with Guy Banister.

"Still on Camp Street?" Mick asked.

"Yep, run down as ever, but good cover for a covert activity. Guy spoke to the FBI in Dallas; our boy flew the coup with his wife and baby."

"So the FBI doesn't know where they are?"

"Are you joking, the FBI wouldn't know if the kid was stepping on their heels, and besides I didn't want to show a big interest."

"Wise guy."

"So, Banister doesn't know either." Mick asked.

"Mick you know these guys better than I do, they play these little cat and mouse games, to see what is in it for them, and to determine the level of your intelligence."

"Yeh, we have a little time, so don't put the heat on...and we haven't clearly placed this guy on the team...just a prospect."

"Hell if that falls apart, I'll take the shot...what would be wrong with that?"

"Look Ray Ray, I don't want to pump-up your head but the CIA figures your level of expertise would cost a million bucks to replace." Mick said.

"So that is why they gave me a demotion." They laughed.

"What about Louie' de what’s his name?"

"He's in Haiti; again I don't want him close to the plan, the guys an octopus."

"Do you think this kid is our man?" Mick asked.

"Sounds right, politically and otherwise. Wagner is insisting on a shooter with metals. The kids an ex-Marine. I got his M-1 score and some of his other records." Ray Ray said.

"Can he shoot?"

"Spotty record!"

"Maybe he cheated, remember this kid has mental issues and loves to play games."

"From day-one I have had a nagging problem with this guy, if he chooses to go it alone in that final moment when the shots wake the monster in him and he unloads the shot that kills the President...we all have to remember this is a twenty-one year old punk-kid." Mick said.

"You asked for something realistic, something the press and intelligence would not recognize as a ploy...we got three maybe four shooters and Lancer is in the middle with multiple rounds of munitions flying from various vantages."

"Yes, there is risk." Mick said.

"Louie says hit the vehicles, hit the limo, hit the bikes, hit one of the Secret Service guys, aren't they sworn to take the shot?"

"Remember Ray Ray, shoot to miss." Mick said.

"But truthfully Mick, in the moment, shit happens and my belief is there is less risk with one shooter. Hell all we want to do is to take a shot that hits the limo, knocks out a light, for Christ sakes 1 have a twelve year old that could do that. You get a bunch of goddamn cowboys out there and it becomes a bar-room free for all."

"But you can't phony this thing up, Ray Ray."

"Any news on the sight?"

"Still Miami."

"Great, every Cuban in the crowd will be armed."

"That's the spot most advisable and likely to produce a motorcade with convertibles, and that is the reason we need those fifty men in the crowd to hack any would be shooter."

Mick asked Ray Ray to stay in touch with Banister, and at the first sign of the kid there would be an immediate need for a thorough debriefing and determination as to his fitness to handle this job. Put the kid and his family in a trailer in a remote spots that he doesn't fly away again, or decide to hurt someone. Have a 24/7 stake-out...get his tacit approval to take the shot.

Banister was like the house manager of a co-ed dorm on a Cuban holiday. The office was always a beehive of activity of every type and size with boom-boxes held on the shoulder and dancing to the music. Guy would find a substitute if the kid stayed out of sight, maybe someone with a better record for shooting the rifle with a high-powered scope. A shooter who could blast a button from a shirt cuff at two hundred yards...or not.

When Mick had gone, Ray Ray sat in the bleachers watching the recruits, and he remembered when he once was in their shoes, he could not remember being so awkward and he would have advised them to depend more on the body balance. But that wasn't his gig now. The sounds of Asian chatter were a reminder that Saigon was once again the hot spot. It was the talk of the base. He couldn't imagine going back to Asia and he thought to himself, let’s take care of Cuba and quiet South Florida. Chopo Montano and Ricky Valdez had gotten the message, and promptly left a job picking oranges in South Florida to drive up to see what their Gringo friend, Ray Ray had in the works. They felt certain that it had to do with Cuba and this was answer to their prayers to give them another shot at Castro and his brutal brother Raul. They would gladly exchange oranges for weapons even with the Bay of Pigs fresh in their minds. They were certain the fuck-up there was an anomaly which wouldn’t happen again because Kennedy was sure to be replaced.

These were men hardened by back-breaking labor, toiling in the fields in the hot sun and they looked the part of migrants. Chopo was a sturdy short man with no neck and weighing about 165 pounds. He had a shaved head with tattoos running from his wrist to just beneath his chin. He had a thin black mustache and goatee. His partner, Rickie Valdez liked to wear a Texan style cattleman’s hat, looking like the wonderful western actor Yuhl Brenner. He was thin but very strong from the work in the Orange Groves. He too was tattooed from the waist-up with prison art for two or three books of stamps. Figure twenty stamps at 15 cents and you have a cheap, permanent piece of art…on the street this job would have taken a month’s wages.

The men had a passion for Cuba and a hatred for the Castro brothers, even though they hated Batista equally. The family in Cuba was poor sugar cane farmers but the family was tight knit and loving. The same kind of emotion which once existed in the United States before communication brain washed the children who had to have someone’s named stitched on their ass and a certain technology stuck in their ear and China White stuffed up their nose.

Chopo and Ray Ray were very close, trusted each other and Chopo remembered each time they met that Ray Ray had saved his life, literally dragging him across a field under fire. Chopo had suffered a seizure in the heat of battle and it was Ray Ray who got his belt into his mouth to secure the tongue while firing at the enemy. Then he placed the 165 pound Chopo on his wide shoulder and carried him to safety. By the time the air cover came in, Chopo had fully recovered and was peaceful. The men had bonded as only a war experience will often do and there after both trusted each other implicitly, even though Chopo lovingly referred to Ray Ray as his uptown Gringo.

Both Chopo and his partner Valdez had been with Castro and Che Guevara, actually they called him “Ernesto” who was the heart and brains behind the origination of the guerrilla style warfare to free the Cubans from the dictator Batista.

Che Guevara was a physician, born in 1928 and died in 1967, and in 1952 at the age of 24 he took part in the riots against Juan Peron in his birth place of Argentina. He then joined agitators in Bolivia and used his skill as a physician to work among the Lepers. In 1953 he went to Guatemala joining the pro communist regime of Jacaba Arbenz Guzman and when Guzman was overthrown in 1954, he fled to Mexico where he met Fidel Castro and other Cuban rebels. Che Guevara became Castro’s trusted Lieutenant soon after the rebel invasion of Cuba in 1956. Che proved to be a resourceful guerrilla and was soon one of Castro’s closest and most trusted friends. As President of the Cuban National Bank after the fall of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, he established financial methodology which was instrumental in cutting Cuba’s traditional economic ties to the United States and in the direction of Cuba’s flow of trade to the communist bloc countries. He served as the Minister of Trade and Industry from 1961 to 1965.

At heart a revolutionary rather than an administrator, he left Cuba in 1965 in order to foster revolutionary activity in other countries. In 1967 while directing a guerrilla movement in Bolivia, he was wounded in a clash with government troops, captured, and executed.

He wrote several books while on the field of battle: Guerrilla Warfare (1961), Man and Socialism in Cuba (1967 and Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (1968). Che was thirty-nine years of age when executed.

In the early days of the Freedom Fighters, men like Chopo formed the heart and soul of the effort to free their loved ones from the oppression, the poverty in which they were moribund by an evil dictator supported by the United States. But along the way Castro lost sight of the main purpose and ultimately became more oppressive than was Batista, especially against those who opposed him.

Even as evil and crushing as Batista was, he had to maintain some semblance of humanistic concern in order to continue the support from the United States who had its own brand of bigotry and abuse. Additionally, the Mafia was instrumental in urging the Batista regimes to moderate its abuse of its people in order to preclude a more close scrutiny of the activity by America...and its liberal elite.

"I knew you had something big to pay our way here from south Florida." Chopo said.

"Yes...and Ricky...the wife (Lucy)" The men laughed, "How is the family?" Ray Ray asked.

"Senor, we are blessed." Vesquez said.

"And Chopo my dear friend has no woman turned you into a family man."

"You mean women, Gringo?"

"Oh yes, I forgot you and the Chimichanga, what is it the women see in you?"

Chopo feigned a fist to the ribs and shot out his tongue while making the shrill call of the Banshee Indian on the warpath."

The three men rocked in laughter as Chopo clowned...and the ritual handshake took place in the mind and the men knew all was well...the necessary foreplay between men. It was expected to loosen the men after the long intervals in which they had not seen o one another. They enjoyed the affection that only comes with time and the perilous nature of their business. In the end they knew the subject wasn't roses, wasn't wine, women and song nor the cheeks of fat babies. In the end the subject was death, and the possibilities of staying alive while invoking remedy.

Ray Ray explained the nature of this action and some of the names behind the scheme. Explaining why this was a two-step process to once again gain the support and the confidence of the congress, and the nation to deal once and for all times with the issue of Castro.

He shared with them a shooting was under design to implicate the Direccion General de Intelligencia as a criminal organization which was directed and sanctioned by Castro and his brother Raul to contain civil disobedience and the lethal action against the political enemies of the state. Ray Ray wanted the two men to be a part of the team of shooters. They would get the high-powered rifles with the super-scopes and would be placed above the traffic on a railroad trestle, an overpass; a roof... taught how to leave a tainted trail to the door of a conspiracy. They would be paid well to begin immediately at the Farm to be trained and there was to be a bonus upon the completion of a successful job.

Ray Ray did not mention any of the other members of the shooting team. Only that they were led by men with deep backgrounds in all forms of clandestine operations, respected for years of dedication and participation in outings and all dedicated to the prospect that Castro had to go and a Free Havana to flourish as in days of old.

He did not tell them Flynt or Wagner by name. He did not tell them who the target was or where the shooting would take place. They accepted that this was a moving target and they would be briefed when the final detail was known. The other thing that Ray Ray did not say was that they were going to be-asked to make certain they missed the target.

Michael Flynt's wife was not your run-of-the-mill puff piece left to run the Georgetown Brownstone, attend coffees and cocktails, smile and play footsies with local congressman, long since beyond their prime but with the potential to direct traffic or contract of a political nature.

On the contrary she was bright, witty and very pretty in an artsy way. She was unique in a crowd of Gucci’s, she designed her own label and most of the women sought the name of the designer. Mick was man enough to give her a wide berth, which often included a thorough denigration of the CIA and the ruthless government it served.

And these politically inflamed conversations carried over into the private conversations of the couple.

"Mick, the dearest man in my life, I wasn't denigrating what you did in Guatemala, and I admired you for your role, if not politically than in other ways. The fact that you left no bloody trail, I admire that." she said.

"Yes I try to be efficient and limit the violence." He said.

"Of course there would have been no need for an operation if Guatemala hadn't taken back all the land belonging to United Fruit Company." She suggested.

"Is that really the provocation?" he asked.

"I love the way you say efficient." She smiled.

Yes Mick was so clever to disguise the CIA's interest in Guatemala (or was it United Fruit) when Mick developed the strategy employed by the North Vietnamese to send propaganda over the radio transmission, broadcasting from Honduras with messages designed to place pressure on the leftist government and disrupt the daily lives of the people.

This was a broadcast from hell; the government of Guatemala could do no right. In the midst of the propaganda, a bomb was dropped from a single engine plane into the middle of a parade ground. The broadcast would have the citizens to believe an eminent invasion of fifty thousand troops with air cover would soon descend upon the cities like locust. The reports on the radio were so descriptive and believable that within two weeks the government fell without a shot.

A decade since and Mick moved on. The CIA put him in charge of developing corporations as advance mechanisms to gather intelligence for the planned operations in places like Yemen and Kurdistan.

During this period he discovered several CIA assets with important holdings in sensitive parts of the hemisphere. One of those involved United Fruit and there were banks, sugar, oil, coffee, cocoa and arms. A montage of holdings designed with motives, often operated by men with criminal records, including prison time. Mick saw there was a natural bridge between the interest of business and intelligence.

He had always been taught that the road to wealth and privilege was to follow the wealth. American genius aside, the road to the development of any invention was fraught with traps from lawyers stealing it, to the virtual loss of control to share-holders and hostile take-over’s and the money lenders. Mick believed that a man had to bide his time while on the look-out for assets that could be verified and then leveraged in a TRUE ARBITRAGE.

The CIA held huge collections on intelligence of most of the southern hemisphere. Mick had invested time in Cuba, designing business plans with the blessings of the Batista government. He'd arranged mineral surveys, land development analysis, drilling contracts and Casino franchises. He traveled all over the world to discover its discontent...and when all else was failing around him, he still had the unproven oil properties in Cuba.

After Batista got the boot, a plan was put into motion to invade. Mick set-up several dummy corporations, which in many cases were difficult for him to determine who was what and that was a good thing. The corporate board always contained close family and former high-ranking intelligence officers. It was a business plan based in large part of the greater world where business has an almost surreal sense of overlap. This plan differed, it was tighter, and these were men dedicated to the perfection of history and their place in it.

Louis Wagner had discovered that JFK would not support air cover for the Cuban invasion. No one could believe how cruel and stupid this was on the part of the President.

Michael Flynt arrived from Miami, wrote a letter of resignation and flew back to Miami to be with the exile leaders under wraps in an old barracks at Opa-Locka in order to prevent leaks on the landing. He knew the men were not prepared to heal the carnage on the beach to friends and family and he wanted to be there to console them.

From the moment the CIA monitored a rebel broadcast on January 1, 1959, announcing that the tyrant Batista had fled the country at 2:00am and that Fidel Castro was now the leader of the country. From that moment until now, four and one-half years later, Louis Wagner had been in one plot or another to retake Cuba. His wife called it "The last call for the dining hall".

He'd have nothing to do with the gambling interest that carried cash out while buying off government officials sending camping bags through the Bahamas to the banks in Switzerland. He wanted nothing to do with those Dagoes.