From Bay of Pigs to the Contras, Rodriguez Fights On : Crash Puts Shadow Warrior in Spotlight

It was April 17, 1961. Felix Rodriguez, a 19-year-old Cuban-American, had been secretly inside Fidel Castro’s Cuba for two months, waiting for a signal from the CIA that the Bay of Pigs invasion had begun. Rodriguez had explosive charges primed and in place, ready t1864393324were standing by to cut telephone lines and foment disorder.

The invasion began at dawn. But not until midday did the messages arrive for the saboteurs--and by then it was too late: Castro’s men were already rolling up the underground networks. “The roads were closed, the houses were surrounded and they were arresting thousands of people,” Rodriguez said later. “I cried.”

For 25 years since that day, Felix Rodriguez has been fighting to avenge the CIA’s failure, a secret soldier in the shadow world of U.S. clandestine operations. And no ordinary soldier--Rodriguez’s exploits are the stuff, in the words of one of his comrades, “of a book--no, more than just one book.”

Under one false name or another, Rodriguez has landed secretly in Cuba at least six times. He has fought in Vietnam, the Congo and El Salvador. In 1967, he helped Bolivian troops capture and kill Castro’s lieutenant, Che Guevara, as he was attempting to spread Marxist revolution in South America; Rodriguez still wears Guevara’s wristwatch to prove it.

His odyssey has also taken him to the White House office of Vice President George Bush.

But when a man called “Max Gomez” was named as the chief of a secret airborne supply line for Nicaraguan rebels based in El Salvador, it came as no surprise to veterans of clandestine warfare that Gomez’s real name was Felix Rodriguez.

Today, Felix Rodriguez, the anonymous hero of a hundred unknown battles, is in the middle of a highly public controversy over America’s role in Nicaragua. The Reagan Administration--and his old comrades-in-arms--say Rodriguez was acting as a private citizen, with no direction or pay from the U.S. government he served for so long. But the evidence has mounted that, while Rodriguez left the CIA payroll years ago, he remained solidly inside the shadow world of clandestine operations--a private soldier in a secret, but public, cause.

His story explains much of how the Reagan Administration could assemble a private U.S. network to help the Nicaraguan rebels, known as contras , continue their war despite Congress’ ban.

It also illuminates some of the CIA’s secret wars, which have long been little known, and a few operations that have never before been revealed in detail.

“He’s a patriot,” said Bush, who has acknowledged meeting Rodriguez three times. “I know what he was doing in El Salvador, and I strongly support it. . . . This man, an expert in counterinsurgency, was down there helping them put down a Communist-led revolution.”

Declines Interviews

Rodriguez has reportedly lain low in Miami ever since he was publicly identified as the chief of the contras’ supply operation by Eugene Hasenfus, an American crewman captured by Sandinista troops after his C-123 cargo plane was shot down inside Nicaragua. He did not respond to several requests for an interview.

But many of his friends and comrades-in-arms did agree to speak--some because they believe it is time that he received some credit for his exploits, others because they fear he may be made a scapegoat in the furor over the crash.

Felix Ismael Rodriguez Mendigutia, now 45, was born May 31, 1941, the son of a middle-class shopkeeper in the quiet colonial town of Sancti Spiritus, southeast of Havana.

Like many young men from conservative, anti-Communist families, young Rodriguez joined Brigade 2506, the Cuban exile organization armed by the CIA to overthrow Castro.

The CIA named Rodriguez the leader of a five-man infiltration team whose mission was to help prepare an internal uprising to coincide with the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. At the end of February, 1961, the saboteurs left Key West, Fla., on a 26-foot motor launch and crossed the Florida Strait, landing at night on a rocky shore east of Havana.

Took Part in Raids

When the invasion failed, the infiltration teams were left high and dry. Rodriguez made his way back to Havana and took political asylum in the Venezuelan Embassy; a few months later, he was granted permission to leave the country.

But Rodriguez’s anti-Castro crusade was far from over. Jose Basulto, a longtime friend, said Rodriguez participated in at least six secret sabotage raids on Cuba and attempts to infiltrate the island, some of them CIA-assisted.

In the mid-1960s, the thread of Rodriguez’s career becomes difficult to trace. He apparently told some friends that he was in the army, but Basulto, his closest friend, says that was a cover story: Rodriguez was now a full-time officer in the CIA’s clandestine service.

“He worked for years for the CIA until he retired,” Basulto said. “And I know he retired, because I have seen his retirement papers. I think he has the highest decoration the CIA gives.”

In 1967 came the high point of Rodriguez’s career: the capture of Ernesto (Che) Guevara.

Guevara, an Argentine theorist of revolution who was sent abroad by Castro as his apostle of revolution, was in Bolivia trying to start a rural guerrilla movement. A Bolivian army team, advised by the CIA, caught up with him in October, 1967.

“He is the guy who was in charge of that operation,” said a longtime CIA veteran who refused to be quoted by name. “Felix was the last guy to see him alive. They had been adversaries for a long time. They faced each other with mutual respect. He still talks of Che with respect.”

Gift from Che

Several former CIA officers and friends of Rodriguez said the CIA advisers wanted to keep Guevara alive for further interrogation, but Bolivian officials ordered his execution. Before he died, Rodriguez has told friends, Guevara handed him his watch--the watch the ex-CIA man still wears.

In the late 1960s, the CIA was swiftly expanding its operations in Vietnam, and Felix Rodriguez went along.

Several sources said Rodriguez became a specialist in “lightning” operations, in which small helicopters detected guerrilla columns and called in swift strikes by larger gunships.

“He was shot down twice,” Basulto recalled. As a result of the last crash, Rodriguez hurt his back. In about 1975, friends said, he retired from the CIA with disability pay.

But Rodriguez left the CIA with a host of key contacts around the world and in Washington, including Donald Gregg, now the national security adviser to Vice President Bush--himself a former director of the CIA.

His war against communism--and against Fidel Castro--was still not over.

In about 1981, Basulto said, Rodriguez went to Honduras to help the anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan exiles there--the nucleus of the force that would later become the contras. “He was trying to get his old contacts in the governments of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to give some support,” the CIA veteran said. “And I guess, from the results, that he succeeded.”

Organized Private Aid

The CIA moved into the fight at the end of 1981, and again Rodriguez’s traces disappeared. American agents raided Nicaragua’s coast by boat, ran air strikes into the country and helped the contras organize their army--but Rodriguez’s friends, and contra sources, insist that Felix was not among them.

Yet when Congress cut off the contras’ funding in 1984, Rodriguez almost instantly reappeared, organizing private help for the rebels in Miami. “I met him then,” said Adolfo Calero, the leader of the largest contra army. “To me, he’s a damn good man--a patriot, a free-lancer for democracy.”

Rodriguez told Calero that he wanted to work for the contras full time, Calero said--”but then he vanished.” The problem, one of Rodriguez’s friends said, was that he was simply running out of money--and the contras were, too.

He found a place advising the Salvadoran air force, teaching its pilots how to apply the “lightning” tactics that he had used in Vietnam. But first, sources said, the Salvadorans wanted to see a recommendation from the U.S. government. Rodriguez met with Bush, and went back to San Salvador with the blessing of the White House.

The Salvadorans already had 55 U.S. military advisers, but under U.S. rules they couldn’t go on combat missions; Rodriguez could. And that he did--according to two witnesses, at least once flying the lead helicopter, at the age of 44, in a lightning raid against Salvadoran guerrillas.

In 1985, when Honduras restricted contra supply operations there, the rebels turned to El Salvador. Sources said the commander of El Salvador’s air force, Gen. Juan Rafael Bustillo, turned to Felix Rodriguez to help run the new, expanded operation.

On May 1, 1986, Rodriguez came back to Washington to meet again with Bush. Bush insists that they talked only about El Salvador, not Nicaragua; Donald Gregg has refused to comment on the subject of his talks with Rodriguez. (It was illegal then, as it is now, for U.S. officials to help anyone to provide weapons to the contras.)

At about the same time as those talks, the contras’ flights through Ilopango increased, sources said.

Rodriguez told associates that he reported to Gregg about his activities at the Salvadoran air base of Ilopango, including his help for the contras.

Identified by Hasenfus

And, one knowledgeable official said Wednesday, U.S. Ambassador Edwin G. Corr had lunch “at least once” with Rodriguez, who was in the country under the nom de guerre Max Gomez.

But Rodriguez’s last covert operation came to an abrupt end last Thursday when Hasenfus, the crewman captured in Nicaragua, named him as the chief of the supply line--and identified him as a CIA agent.

Rodriguez disappeared. His operation’s “safehouse,” a villa on one of El Salvador’s most elegant streets, abruptly emptied--with a Salvadoran police guard from the U.S. Embassy stationed in the driveway.

His friends say he is hiding in Miami, staying with yet another old comrade from the first crusade--the Bay of Pigs campaign against Castro.

But this time, his cover has been badly blown. Veterans of the clandestine world all say they fear that Felix Rodriguez’s war is over at last.

“I hate to see this happen to him,” one official said.

But his oldest comrade, Basulto, believes Rodriguez will be back.

“He is like a volcano,” he said. “He just can’t hold that inside. Whenever he sees an opportunity to go fight against communism, he can’t hold back.”

Doyle McManus reported from Washington and William Long from Miami.