[Marxism] MIAMI HERALD: For sale: House of spies

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

JANE FRANKLIN writes this introductory note:
This article makes it seem like the covert operations against Cuba are all
in the distant past, nostalgic memories.  Keep in mind that the 2006 report
of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba has a "secret annex," the
contents of which are known only to those who plan and implement them.
Jane Franklin
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jbfranklins

Miami Herald

Posted on Sun, Apr. 20, 2008

For sale: House of spies
BY JENNY STALETOVICH

The house at 6312 Riviera Dr. in Coral Gables is grand by almost any
measure. It has a 33-foot long living room with dragons carved into its
marble fireplace, vases that once belonged to Umberto I, King of Italy, a
dance patio, mini-Olympic pool, an elevator, a tidewater pond, more than a
dozen bathrooms, two roomy boathouses and a pedigreed architect. Batista
once considered buying it and Billy Graham left behind a signed Bible.
In recent years, passing motorists have pulled through its noble
wrought-iron gates, mistaking it for a country club.

Given its extreme curb appeal, it seems incredible that the CIA used the
house for secret operations at the height of its covert war against Fidel
Castro in the 1960s. Then again, this is Miami -- no stranger to the high
jinks of history.

CIA operatives would stride across the lush lawn in broad daylight, past the
pink cupola and into the boathouse where they would board a souped-up boat,
part of an armada that then amounted to the Caribbean's third largest naval
fleet. Once armed, and sometimes hooded, they would motor down the Coral
Gables Waterway to launch one of hundreds of missions carried out against
Cuba's Communist government.

Now, after almost 50 years in the same family, the house is being sold.
Asking price? A cool $22 million, which includes an island, also a former
CIA outpost.

''We used to feel very uncomfortable because of the appearance of ourselves
with the house,'' said Rolando Martinez, 85, a spy who used the house but is
more famously known as one of the five Watergate burglars. ``When we
returned from some operations, I remember we were walking from the house and
neighbors walking dogs would call us insurrectos.''

For Wirt Maxey, then a preoccupied kid of 14 or 15, the house was home. If
his father was having company in the boat house, he had no idea it was the
Company.

''I remember people coming and going at rather odd hours and I was basically
told that these people were renting the boathouse and had a right to come
and go and leave them alone,'' he said.

In his quasi-factual novel Harlot's Ghost, Norman Mailer called the mansion
``a nice, cool, handsome house when all is said.''

For most of the last half century, Maxey's father, Tom, an attorney,
maintained the house meticulously, keeping it much the same as when Martinez
and the spooks who directed him hatched their missions. The boathouse locker
room, where the men showered after missions, remains a cradle of polished
yellow tile, a sign with carved iron sea horses distinguishing the men's
from the women's locker room.

DECISION TO SELL

After Tom Maxey died nearly two years ago, Wirt, who had moved back in with
his family to care for his ailing father, and his two younger sisters
decided to sell the house, along with the island, a 45-wminute boat ride
away, which the CIA also leased.

Situated in the middle of a chain known as the Ragged Keys, it is officially
Ragged Key #3, although Ragged Key #2 is just an outcropping of coral rock.
Ragged Key #3, the one with the CIA past, is the only Ragged Key that's
inhabited. It includes a two-story home, caretaker's cottage, mini-power
plant, pool and dock house and resident dogs who for years have noisily
announced the presence of any nearby boaters. The stark white buildings,
visible to anyone who has ever tried to navigate the channels and flats of
Biscayne Bay, reflect the sun like beacons. Except for the lighthouse on
nearby Boca Chita, the island's towering flag pole is the tallest thing in
sight.

In 1960, when Tom Maxey acquired the house from Edward Christiansen in
exchange for legal work, he also got the island. He later told his son the
CIA used it to monitor Castro.

Originally, the island had a small house. Christiansen built a more modern
house with an upstairs that served as a bunk room, said his daughter, Karen
Davis, who now lives in Miami Shores.

''He put the pool in, too, and my brother says he had to get an act of
Congress to dredge so we could get our boat into the island,'' she said.

Wirt Maxey only learned of the CIA deals years later. He can't remember now
how it came up, but one day his father told him that the men he'd seen
coming and going from the boat house had indeed been running covert
operations to Cuba. And the television company that leased the island was a
CIA cover.

''It was pretty cool to me,'' he said. ``I remember a boat. Not a fancy boat
at all, but kind of a crappy looking boat from the outside. I learned later
on from my father that that crappy-looking boat would go 70 mph.''

Other than the crappy boat and men traipsing across the lawn at strange
hours, Maxey doesn't remember much. The rest of the tale falls to the
countless books and articles inspired by the era. And of course the spy,
Martinez, now retired on Miami Beach and spending his time caring for his
wife, 82, who suffers from Alzheimer's.

Martinez said he came to Florida in 1941 and enrolled at Florida Southern
College in Lakeland. At the time, Miami ''was nothing. Later on, I came
back. I came in the '50s,'' he said.

Officially, he was recruited by the CIA in 1960. All these years later, he
remains vague about details, sometimes recounting only what has been
officially declassified. He says Watergate -- for which he received a
presidential pardon and praise for a distinguished record -- left him wary.
Later, he was prosecuted for lying about his involvement with the CIA, even
though the agency had sworn him to secrecy.

Altogether, Martinez says he ran 354 operations from the house and other
bases throughout South Florida.

In a 1975 article for Harper's magazine, he described one tense episode to
historians Taylor Branch and George Crile III:

``Once a Castro gunboat came after my boat on a mission on the north coast
of Cuba and I radioed for help. Before we could even decode the return
message, there were two Phantom jets and a Neptune flying over us. It's a
trademark of the American forces in general. You have seen how in Vietnam if
a helicopter goes down, ten other helicopters will fly in to get the pilot
out. That was the same spirit that prevailed in our operations.''

SPIES EVERYWHERE

At the time, the CIA was everywhere in Miami: recruiting spies at the Sears
on Douglas Road and Coral Way and tossing back drinks at 27 Birds, their
name for the Big Daddy's at Southwest 27th Avenue and Bird Road, reports a
2004 study commissioned by the National Park Service.

''Only in a city like Miami could the clandestine empire of (the CIA
operations) escape public attention. In the early years of the secret war,
Miami already resembled wartime Casablanca,'' Branch and Crile wrote in the
Harper's story, which included a photo of the Riviera Drive house.

A year after Castro's takeover in 1959, CIA director Allen Dulles had
already introduced a plan to President Dwight Eisenhower to overthrow
Castro, the Park Service study reported. Eisenhower, in turn, authorized $13
million -- which eventually rose to $50 million a year -- to train and
recruit an army of about 1,500 exiles.

The study included a list of locations inside and out of National Park
boundaries that serves as a kind of tour map. The boathouse, the report
says, ``offered a location where infiltration vessels could be hidden from
plain view, thus shielding their extensive modifications and true nature
from prying eyes.''

Eventually, the CIA's station in Miami, housed on the south campus of the
University of Miami (and now Miami MetroZoo), grew to be the largest outside
its headquarters in Langley, Va., Don Bohning wrote in his book, The Castro
Obsession. About 400 agents oversaw ''thousands of Cuban exiles added to the
payroll for everything from propaganda to sabotage,'' and created between
300 and 400 front companies to cover its tracks.

With so many exiles and the Communist threat fueling patriotism, recruiting
was not difficult, even among private citizens like Tom Maxey, who ran his
own law practice along with a real estate investment firm.

''They would openly go up to someone, like at The Herald, (managing editor)
George Beebe, and say we need your help. That was not uncommon. I'm sure
there were dozens of legitimate companies in Miami that were cooperating.
Here you have a major academic institution (UM) cooperating with them, so
you can imagine,'' said Bohning, a former Herald reporter and editor. ``The
atmosphere was completely different.''

And most would readily agree to help.

''So long as Cuba was a target for intelligence gathering, Miami was the
natural starting point for those operations,'' said historian Timothy
Naftali, author of One Hell of a Gamble and curator of the Nixon Library.
``Miami has played a key role in the secret history of the United States. In
Cold War Miami, the CIA would not have had a hard time recruiting.''

Wirt Maxey does not know how the CIA contacted his father. However, his
uncle, Jackson Maxey, worked for the agency in Washington, he said. Years
later, Maxey's father told Wirt he informed his brother, Jackson, that he'd
been leasing the house and island to Jackson's employer. And his brother
never knew.

That doesn't surprise Martinez.

''There is something they call compartmentation and they have a good
cover,'' he said. ``I'm sure the people who bought the house at the time
were well-connected with the government because they had to have national
security clearance.''

Back to the house. Built in 1937, it was designed by the architectural firm
of Paist and Steward, whose founding partner, Phineas Paist, was supervising
architect for Coral Gables at its incorporation in 1925. Initially hired by
George Merrick as a colorist, Paist gained fame for his monumental
buildings, said historian Arva Moore Parks. His work includes the Colonnade
Building, Coral Gables City Hall, the city's old police and fire station and
its original Arts Center, now the sales office for the upscale Old Spanish
Village project.

The house was built for Roy Page, said Gables' Preservation Officer Kara
Noelle Kautz. In 1945, owner Larry Hughy was given permission to add the
dock, records show, and in 1952, Christiansen added the side wings that
include, among other things, the guest house, game room and servant
quarters. A year later, he added the pool and boathouses.

In the 1950s, Fulgencio Batista, who had a home in Daytona Beach, visited
when he was considering buying it as a retreat, said Davis, Christiansen's
daughter.

Having a house from the era largely intact and in such good shape is rare,
Parks said. ``It's a gift.''

Despite its grand scale, Martinez said it worked remarkably well for the
spies.

''You could go through the channel to the open seas and return and keep it
very silent. No one would suspect that house was used in the operations
against the Communist regime of Cuba,'' he said. ``It was a very good house.
It was beautiful. And we behaved very according to the house.''

=========================================
     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Los Angeles, California
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un ParaÃso bajo el bloqueo"
=========================================

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