Félix Rodríguez

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Félix Rodríguez (2006)

Félix Ismael Rodríguez Mendigutía (* 1941 in Havana , Cuba ) is a former CIA - Agent and was through his involvement in the Bay of Pigs Invasion , his involvement during questioning and his presence at the execution of Che Guevara and his ties to George HW Bush known during the Iran-Contra affair . He is Cuban American with Spanish and Basque ancestry.

Life

Youth in Cuba and the USA

Rodríguez first grew up in Sancti Spíritus , where his father ran a general store. He went to Havana with his mother when her brother, who had already been elected Senator of the Las Villas province , was appointed Minister of Construction by Fulgencio Batista after his military coup in March 1952. In 1954 Rodríguez was sent to a private school in Pennsylvania to continue his school career , where he graduated from high school in 1960 .

Action against Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba

In July 1959 he joined the “Anti-Communist Caribbean Legion” - an international volunteer force that had been organized by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo shortly before with the aim of violently overthrowing Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba . According to his own statement, the shocking film reports of the mass shootings and show trials carried out under Castro in the first months of the revolution had convinced him that he was fighting the new regime. The planned invasion was betrayed and had to be canceled in August 1959, while Rodríguez was still waiting for his order to operate in the Dominican Republic. He then returned to the USA.

After graduating from school in 1960, he went to Miami, where he already had a place in engineering from the University of Miami . He took part in the military training of the group Cruzada Constitucional Cubana , which had been founded by Pedro Luis Díaz-Lanz, chief of the Revolutionary Air Force, who fled Cuba in June 1959. While he was working as an assistant in a fish farm, he learned of the recruitment of Cuban exiled volunteers for an invasion force. Together with a friend and without informing his family, he reported to the organization and was flown to Guatemala in September 1960, where the group supported by the CIA and later called Brigade 2506 had a base and a training camp. He was a member of a special unit that had already entered Cuba by sea in February 1961, two months before the actual invasion of the Bay of Pigs, and was supposed to create weapons smuggled into the country with local underground groups to support the insurgents in the province of Las Villas. Rodríguez was surprised by the invasion in Havana, where he was able to escape the massive - in many cases only provisional - arrests of opposition suspects and was finally granted political asylum in the Venezuelan ambassador's residence. After more than five months he was allowed to leave Cuba by plane for Caracas . A few days later he again went by sea from Florida to Cuba and infiltrated back to Havana with a reconnaissance mission from the CIA.

After several missions, he left the CIA in 1962 to marry his fiancée and lead a civilian life. He first worked for an advertising agency and then for a packaging company. At the height of the missile crisis in October 1962, however, he was spontaneously reactivated when the CIA recruited him for intelligence activities in Cuba in support of a planned invasion by US marines and for target identification for air strikes on Soviet missile bases. On the planned day of the operation, the Soviet government agreed to the United States' ultimate demand for the withdrawal of nuclear missiles, so that the crisis was defused and Rodríguez's mission was also canceled. Since he had already given up his civilian job, he decided to re-join the CIA on a permanent basis.

Interrogation of Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Bolivia

After hints had been increasing since March 1967 that the Argentine Social Revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara was trying to organize a guerrilla war from the Bolivian mountains, Rodríguez was ordered by the CIA, together with other agents, to La Paz to search for the Bolivian military and authorities to reinforce Guevara. After he was captured by Bolivian soldiers in October 1967, Rodríguez interrogated Guevara, but Guevara refused. According to his own account, it was Rodríguez who conveyed the order of the Bolivian military leadership to the shooting of Guevara to the local soldiers. The photo showing him with Che shortly before he was shot may be fake. According to the photographer, Rodríguez was not originally in the photo.

Further missions for the CIA and the US Army

In 1969 Rodríguez became a citizen of the United States of America and enrolled in the US Army . For the Army and the CIA, he worked in various theaters of war, including Southeast Asia and Central America. In the Vietnam War, the CIA was involved in Operation Phoenix and developed low-level flights with attack helicopters as a successful method in the jungle war . In 1976 he initially retired.

Role in the Iran-Contra affair

Using his previous CIA contacts, Rodríguez turned to the government of President Ronald Reagan in 1983 and offered himself as an advisor on the anti-guerrilla war in El Salvador . As a result, from 1985 onwards, he met three times with the then Vice President George Bush . In the same year, he got involved in the covert program to support the anti-communist Contras , headed by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North , which explicitly contradicted the legal situation passed by the US Congress and was launched from October 1985 - initially by then Senator John Kerry - as part of the later Iran Contra affair called political scandal was uncovered. Specifically, in 1985 and 1986 Rodríguez was responsible for supplying the Contras operating in Nicaragua with weapons and other supplies delivered from the USA, which he organized from the Salvadorean military airfield Ilopango . Details of the secret support program gradually became known after one of the aircraft Rodríguez had sent to Nicaragua with military equipment was shot down in October 1986, and a surviving American was arrested and interrogated. Since Rodríguez acted as a private individual and not as a government employee, he himself was not accused of any criminal acts by the US judiciary. However, a central issue of the later investigations became whether Vice President Bush had received knowledge of the operations from Rodríguez or his direct contact at the White House, Bush's security adviser Donald Gregg, which the people involved denied.

Awards and honors

Rodríguez received the Intelligence Star from the CIA , a medal for special bravery. The South Vietnamese government awarded him a total of nine Galantry Crosses for his services .

Publications

  • Shadow Warrior: The CIA Hero of a Hundred Unknown Battles. (with John Weisman), Simon & Schuster 1989 (English)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Interview, Luis J. Botifoll Oral History Project, Part 1
  2. ↑ Cordt Schnibben : The Treasure of Ché: Cordt Schnibben in search of the corpse of an immortal. In: Der Spiegel of September 16, 1996, accessed April 15, 2015
  3. ↑ Will Grant: CIA man recounts Che Guevara's death. In: BBC News of October 8, 2007, accessed October 19, 2013 (English)
  4. ^ Felix Rohrbeck: The wrong friend. In: Daily newspaper of October 9, 2007, accessed on October 19, 2013
  5. ↑ a b c Felix Rodriguez (video, 14 minutes), article in the TV news magazine 60 Minutes , circa 1990, accessed via YouTube on April 15, 2015 (English)
  6. ↑ a b c Howard Kohn and Vicky Monks: The Dirty Secrets of George Bush. In: Rolling Stone, November 3, 1988, accessed April 15, 2015
  7. ↑ Matthias Rüb: 50 Years Invasion of the Bay of Pigs: At the wrong time in the wrong place. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of April 17, 2011, accessed on April 15, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Rodríguez, Félix
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rodríguez Mendigutía, Félix Ismael (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American CIA agent
DATE OF BIRTH 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Havana