Spycraft - Melton [157]
At Brandwien’s urging, the panel conducted a full review and recommended that all three techs be awarded the Agency’s highest medal for bravery. DCI Stansfield Turner accepted the recommendation and personally presented David Christ, Thornton Anderson, and Walter Szuminski with the Distinguished Intelligence Cross in May 1979, sixteen years after their return home.
At the time, only seven others had received the DIC in the CIA’s thirty-year history. The citation for each of the techs read:
The DISTINGUISHED INTELLIGENCE CROSS is awarded in recognition of exceptional heroism from September 1960 to April 1963. During this period [the recipient] endured hardships and deprivations with unquestioned loyalty, great personal courage and conspicuous fortitude. [His] exemplary conduct as a professional intelligence officer was highlighted by his unswerving devotion to the Agency and by his disregard for his own personal safety in order to assist others. [The recipient’s] performance in this instance reflects the highest credit on him and the Federal service.40
While the three techs were finding ways to survive in prison, the CIA and TSD were planning to eliminate the Castro government. Both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations pushed the Agency to develop new capabilities for dealing with what was seen as an intolerable political problem in Cuba. Rather than test the international consequences of a military invasion, both Presidents turned to the CIA for secret and covert means to accomplish a policy objective.
The CIA’s Directorate of Plans developed two parallel paths to solving the Cuba problem. Support from the TSD was sought for both plans. Beginning in March 1960, the United States began equipping and training an indigenous “secret army” composed of Cuban exiles and former Batista supporters to invade the island. The second path, direct action against Castro himself, was aimed at incapacitating or killing the Cuban revolutionary.
TSD specialists trained the “Cuban exile army” in clandestine skills needed for a sustained guerilla war. The Cubans were taught clandestine photography and film processing, secret writing, signaling, and use of cover and alias documentation. TSD issued a numbered identity card to each of the trainees and indirectly created the exile army’s name. By selecting the number “2050” for the first card with all others following in numerical order, a TSD tech reasoned that Castro’s intelligence service would think the force was larger than it actually was.41 Then, when recruit number 2056, Jose Santiago, died a few weeks later in a training accident, the Cubans adopted the name “Brigada 2056,” or later, more formally, the “Brigada de Asalto 2056,” in honor of their fallen colleague.
To acquire close-up, clandestine photos of people or objects during the Cold War, small Robot cameras, camouflaged by clothing, were designed to shoot through tiny openings in buttons or tie tacks, 1960s.
The only TSS-TSD-OTS officer killed in the line of duty between 1947 and 2008 was a casualty of anti-Castro operations. Four days before the Bay of Pigs invasion, TSD explosives experts were training members of the force of Cuban nationals in constructing and arming small charges for harassment and sabotage operations. As Nels “Benny” Benson, a forty-five-year-old native of Eagle Bend, Minnesota, and one of TSD’s experienced explosives officers, demonstrated how to mold a charge composed of thermite and C-4 into a form that resembled a soap dish, an errant spark ignited the materials. The resulting fire threatened to spread to adjacent explosives.42
Benson immediately picked up the flaming mixture and carried it away from the site. Critically burned, he died in a Miami hospital three weeks later. One of the nearly one hundred stars chiseled into a granite wall of the lobby of the Original CIA Headquarters Building