Spycraft - Melton [152]
Andy fabricated a slide rule from a discarded cigar box and worked on logarithms from an old engineering text he found scattered amid the trash. Then the techs created a radio. Someone in the prison had smuggled in an earpiece and, amid the garbage-strewn jail, they had managed to scrounge up a few Russian-made transistors along with pieces of medical tubing used for intravenous feeding that could be used as additional earpieces. The tuning coil was created by wrapping copper wire around the cardboard cylinder from an empty roll of toilet paper.
A battery to power the radio remained a problem. “A battery is two dissimilar metals and electrolyte. We had copper from wiring that we ripped out of the walls and tin from galvanized pails, but we needed an electrolyte,” explained Andy. “So we sent a guy to the hospital claiming he was sick, and he came back with a bottle of copper sulfate to treat the alleged ailment. It’s a good thing the guards didn’t make him drink it.” When the crudely assembled materials were combined with the copper sulfate, the battery produced enough current to power the radio.
Another problem was the lack of a soldering iron. All the wires in the makeshift radio had to be tightly twisted together for a high-resistance contact. The antenna was another challenge. Consisting of a length of wire several hundred feet long, prisoners managed to undo a section of corrugated roof on the top tier to string the antenna along the outside.
When finally assembled, the radio could pick up broadcasts from WKWF (“overlooking the beautiful Florida Keys”) and a high-powered, 50,000-watt New Orleans station. Among the news items that the techs particularly remembered was Roger Maris hitting his sixty-first home run and John Glenn becoming the first American to orbit the earth in space. “I used to go up to the roof at night for best reception,” said Andy. “With those four tubes coming out of the radio, I heard American music for the first time in months.”
Because of the constant danger of javios—prison snitches—the radio remained a closely guarded secret. Rumors of a radio prompted a requisa, but the radio itself was never discovered. With communication to the outside world established, the prisoners started an underground prison newspaper. “One of the Cuban prisoners was a radio operator,” recalled Wally. “He was skilled at tuning the radio to find just the right sensitive spots. Once he got a station, he and an assistant, a stenographer who had been a legal secretary, worked with him. They would plug in the earphones and take down the news in shorthand from whatever station could be heard. The next morning, a copy of the handwritten ‘newspaper’ would be circulated among the prisoners.”
On April 14, 1961, the three imprisoned techs went to bed as usual only to be awakened before dawn by the sound of gunfire and tracer rounds from .50 caliber machine-gun fire lighting the building. The invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs had begun. Throughout the winter, rumors of a possible invasion had circulated and now it was happening. The prison burst into chaos as a B-26 from the CIA-trained anti-Castro invasion force flew overhead and, a few days later, on April 17, an invasion force landed on Cuba’s western shore at the Bay of Pigs.
Conceived during the Eisenhower administration, the invasion by 1,400 Cuban nationals was launched with the approval of President Kennedy. Originally proposed for an area known as Trinidad, in the shadow of Cuba’s Escambray Mountains, the plan called for a relatively small invasion force to spark an uprising among the Cuban population. If the revolt proved unsuccessful, the invading forces would then retreat into the mountains to wage guerilla warfare.
However, in March 1961, Kennedy called the plan too “spectacular” and changed the landing site several times before finally settling on the less than ideal Bay of Pigs, a location surrounded by swamps.30 Then, as the ships carrying the