Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

• “Elimination by Illumination” was a plan that called for convincing Cubans that Fidel was the Antichrist. The CIA would spread the rumor that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, and then (presumably when enough Cubans were convinced) an American submarine would surface just outside of view of the shore and launch what are called “star-shells” (essentially fireworks). This would be the Sign. Here comes Jesus to kick Fidel square in the beard. And then? You guessed it. Cuba would then rise in revolt.

Two of my favorite CIA plots deserve special attention. One of them centered on the establishment of “a seaborne propaganda balloon launching facility for the infiltration of anti-Castro, anti-Soviet propaganda into Cuba.” Sounds manageable, right? Take a boat, get upwind of Cuba, tie some notes to balloons, and let ’em go (and Cuba would then rise in revolt).

If only. Nothing the government does, let alone the CIA, is that simple. According to the memorandum that outlined the plan, it would cost approximately fifty thousand dollars to establish a balloon launching capability. Fifty thousand dollars! How is that even possible? Well…

That total includes the purchase of launching, communications, and meteorological equipment, and the training of personnel to conduct these operations. Most of us could do this job for half the money, in about fifteen minutes (twenty if the balloons are particularly hard to tie). But not the CIA. They thought it would take “a minimum of two months” to establish an operational capability. And that $50K? That’s just the start-up costs. From there, it would cost $22,000 per month for the first six-month period to launch a total of a thousand balloons—without factoring in the cost of the propaganda itself. I once managed to inflate hundreds of balloons for a kid’s birthday party in a single afternoon without CIA training. No one paid me thousands of dollars.

Finally, there is the story of Marita Lorenz, Fidel Castro’s on-again, off-again lover, and almost assassin. Lorenz was raised in Germany, but her father was a German cruise ship captain, which gave her a chance to see the wider world at an early age. At nineteen, she was aboard her father’s ship in Havana Harbor when she met Fidel Castro. “I will never forget the first time I beheld that penetrating stare, that beautiful face, that wicked and seductive smile,” she later recounted.

It seems Fidel also fell into lust at first sight. “I am Dr. Castro. Fidel. I am Cuba. I have come to visit your large ship,” he said. As you’re aware, I have invented a few conversations in this book, and you would be forgiven for assuming this is one of them. Is it not.

The two snuck belowdecks, and… well, you know. Before Marita knew it, she was pregnant with Fidel’s baby. According to Lorenz’s memoir, Castro was happy with the situation, but supposedly while he was away on a trip seven months into the pregnancy, Marita was drugged, and when she awoke the baby was gone. She had no idea if she had miscarried, if the baby was forcibly aborted, or if it had been successfully delivered.

Lorenz was (understandably) one unhappy woman. She traveled to the United States, where the U.S. government quickly recruited her to return to Cuba and take her revenge. She was given two botulism-laced pills to use against her lover.

But when she saw him again, Castro knew why she was there. He took his gun out of his holster, handed it to her, and said, “No one can kill me. No one. Ever.”

[Cue sexy ’70s funk soundtrack.]

Marita’s love/lust for Fidel was rekindled. She dumped the poison pills and the two fell into bed together. When they were done, Castro left, and Lorenz returned to the United States.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

So the U.S. government,the CIA, and everyone else had a crack at Castro and failed to kill him. There’s a great joke about Castro’s longevity. It goes like this:

In some kind of diplomatic exchange, Castro is presented with the gift of a Galápagos turtle. He’s polite to the man, but he declines the turtle after learning that it might live for more than a hundred years. “That’s the problem with pets,” Castro says. “You get attached to them, and then they die on you.”

But whatever happened to Felix Rodriguez, the would-be hero of this story?

He infiltrated Cuba with the rest of his 2506 Assault Brigade gray team members just prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion. When the day went bad, he made his way to the sanctuary of the Venezuelan embassy in Havana, where he remained for several months until he could escape back to the United States. Between the fall of 1961 and the summer of 1962 he continued to work from Miami with those opposing Castro, and personally managed to smuggle some ten tons of military equipment into Cuba for use by those resisting Fidel’s rule.

For the next five years, Rodriguez worked for the U.S. government and for exile groups working against the Cuban regime (work that often overlapped). But in 1967, he got a chance to do something every other Cuban exile could only dream of. The CIA asked him to train and lead a team of counterinsurgency soldiers in Bolivia. Their target: Argentinian physician and hero of the Cuban Revolution Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

And they caught him. Felix’s orders from CIA were to do all within his power to keep Che alive. The Agency wanted to take their time interrogating him. They wanted to see what intelligence he could provide about the Castros in Cuba, or other Latin American communist movements he might know about. But the Bolivians refused to let him live, and they had the authority in their own country. He had tried to overthrow their government, and they wanted him dead. Felix did get a chance to talk to him before Che’s execution, and in the last known picture of Che alive, he is standing next to Felix Rodriguez.

Rodriguez went on to survive more than three hundred helicopter missions in Vietnam, and he may or may not have been involved in all kinds of covert CIA activity in the years following—depending on who you ask…

On Friday, March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. local time, a magnitude-9 earthquake started forty-five miles east of Tohoku, Japan. This was a monster. It struck along what is known as a subduction zone, where two of Earth’s tectonic plates collide. In this case, one plate had spent the last few centuries sliding under the other. At some point, the plates stuck together, but they continued trying to move, building up tension over the years, decades, centuries, until one day—this particular Friday—all of that tension released, and the world shook.

And when I use the phrase “the world shook,” it’s not to be flowery or figurative. The six minutes of the Tohoku earthquake actually shifted the Earth on its axis of rotation, and shortened the length of a day by about a microsecond. Japan’s main island, Honshu, moved eastward by eight feet, and about 250 miles of Honshu’s northern coastline dropped by two feet. Tremors were felt as far away as Norway, North America, and Antarctica. The earthquake even produced an infrasonic (lower frequencies than humans can hear) rumble that was so loud it was detected by a satellite in space.

But the most amazing thing about this massively powerful earthquake is how well Japan was prepared for it. Because earthquakes are such a common occurrence in Japan, the country has mandated a high standard for building codes, and developed a well-functioning early warning system. Residents of Tokyo received an entire minute of warning even before the seismic tremors hit the city. The public received text alerts, and high-speed trains, assembly lines, and other potentially vulnerable locations were battened down. As a result, very few Japanese citizens were injured or killed as a direct result of the earthquake.