Our (Mossad) Man in Havana

Newly declassified testimony reveals how CIA’s James Angleton relied on Israelis for Cuba spying after Bay of Pigs disaster—and much more

James Anglton testifying to Congress (Muckrock)

After the CIA’s disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the agency was left blind on the communist controlled island, its counter-revolutionary spies and paramilitaries either killed or rounded up, interrogated and imprisoned. So the CIA turned to Israel’s Mossad to provide it with detailed intelligence reports on the activities of Soviet personnel there, according to a newly declassified document released as part of the Trump administration’s disclosure of materials related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 

In behind-closed-doors congressional testimony in June 1975, the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, described how Israel’s Mossad soon dispatched one of its Russian-speaking operatives to Israel’s embassy in Havana with permission to spy for the CIA under Israeli diplomatic cover.

“He would go to a Hungarian restaurant where the Soviet officers would go,” Angleton told Senate investigators, according to portions of his testimony that were declassified last month. “And he would spot one of the waiters or a head waiter who was Jewish, and it wouldn’t be long before [the waiter] would say, ‘you are from the Israeli embassy,’ and pretty soon one thing led to another. His production was without question the greatest production there was.”