I N T E R N A T I O N A L

Havana. August 2, 2005

Montaner, the terrorist

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD—Special for Granma International—

AT lunchtime on Saturday, December 24 of 1960, a few hours before Christmas festivities, the popular Flogar Department Store on the corner of Galiano and San Rafael Streets in Havana was full of customers. Juan René Maragosa, 13 years old, was leaving the cafeteria along with his sister Marta and their mother when a heavy explosion suddenly knocked them to the floor.

When they were able to look around them, they saw another dozen injured people on the floor, including 5-year-old Olga and 14-year-old Marta Borroto.

Juan René, his face covered in blood after being hit by a fragment of the powerful explosive, was quickly given first aid and taken to a hospital, where the efficient medical personnel saved his life.

Investigators from state security – known then as the G-2 – swiftly interceded, looking for clues that would confirm their suspicions. Yet again, the bomb that was placed in the store had been made with gelatinous dynamite, a product brought into the country by U.S. intelligence services.

It was just two years after the triumph of the Revolution and less than four months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, and counterrevolutionary groups, directed from Miami were very active, with total support – both financial and material – from the Central Intelligence Agency.

But the youthful Cuban counterintelligence did not fail to make its mark.

On Monday, December 26, in the early dawn, a broad operation by the G-2 dealt a mortal blow to a ring that had been placing bombs in shopping centers for some while.

Within a few hours, 17 terrorists had been located and arrested, most of them at their homes, while three bomb-making factories were uncovered and a large volume of weapons, explosives and bomb-making materials confiscated.

The next day, Revolución newspaper announced in giant letters on its front page: “Bomb-making factories taken!” and reported the arrest of those Cubans, whose ties to the CIA would be rapidly exposed; it also reported on the discovery in those individuals’ homes of 17 U.S.-made bombs “fabricated with gelatinous dynamite,” a highly explosive material derived from nitroglycerine.

They also confiscated several blocks of C-3, an explosive known for being highly volatile and prone to being set off by heat, a flame or just a spark. The boxes holding the blocks were marked: “One block equal to half a pound of TNT.”

AMONG THE SUSPECTS, A YOUNG FANATICTC

One of the suspects identified by the newspaper was a young fanatic, Carlos Alberto Montaner Suris, “resident of No. 309 88th Avenue, on the corner of Tercera A,” in the then-exclusive neighborhood of Miramar in Havana.

In Montaner’s home, the newspaper specified, “a canvas bag was confiscated with four detonators, a roll of fuse, a bottle with three bars of live phosphorus, two rolls of tape, four cartridges of ammunition, two olive-green pairs of pants and two militia uniform shirts.”

Even though he was only 17, Montaner had already developed links with the CIA through his association with the Movement for Revolutionary Recovery (MRR).

In the homes of Alfredo Carrión and Manuel Néstor Piñango Pérez, two of the ringleaders, counterintelligence officials found a “submachine gun and two .38 revolvers.”

Finally, it mentioned the other element directly linking the ring to the Flogar store: “at No. 3505 46th Street in Marianao, a quantity of loose cigarettes were confiscated whose boxes (the terrorists) used as recipients for the petards that they fabricated with gelatinous dynamite.”

While Montaner’s accomplices were tried and convicted due to the enormous volume of evidence, the legal authorities took his age into account and confined him to a minimum-security juvenile institution. A few months later, he escaped....to take refuge in an indulgent Latin American embassy where he was awaited, along with instructions for facilitating his safe-conduct pass.

The young terrorist left Cuba, headed for the United States, on September 8, 1961.

WITH POSADA AND BOSCH IN FORT BENNING

In his new country, Montaner joined the armed forces and in early 1963, was inserted into a group of CIA agents in the US terror academy in Fort Benning, Georgia.

He was there with Luis Posada Carriles, Jorge Mas Canosa, Orlando Bosch and four other future “leaders” of the Miami mafia.

After three years in Puerto Rico, then-CIA agent Montaner was assigned to Francisco Franco’s Spain, where he carried out several tasks for the “Company,” always in collaboration with the Spanish secret police, which was subject to the guidance of the U.S. special services.

Among other terror-related activities, in July of 1973, following CIA instructions, Montaner helped terrorist Juan Felipe de la Cruz enter Spain and secretly cross the border into France to repeat there the attack he had carried out in Montreal one year earlier, which caused the death of Cuban diplomat Sergio Pérez Castillo. On August 3, 1973, De La Cruz died when a bomb exploded in a Paris suburb.

It is known that Montaner always maintained very fluid ties with his buddies from Fort Benning: Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, the founders of CORU – the most active of Miami’s terrorist groups; and Jorge Mas Canosa, creator of the Cuban-American National Foundation, who assured Posada and his mercenaries of never-failing financial and logistical support.

Nevertheless, many questions remain open regarding the individual who tried to create for himself the comfortable image of a Madrid “intellectual.”

What was Montaner doing while CORU was placing bombs and committing assassinations from Montreal to Buenos Aires, supporting the Operation Condor of Pinochet’s DINA? 

Where was that Cuban-American CIA agent par excellence when Michael Townley, the henchman lent by the “Company” to the Chilean dictatorship, was in Madrid conspiring with Italian fascist Stefano delle Chiaie to carry out the assassination in Rome of Chilean Christian Democrat leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife?

What secrets remain hidden in the files of the Spanish CESID, the sinister secret police of the Franco dictatorship – whose top agents were trained in Fort Bragg in the United States – regarding Carlos Alberto Montaner and his support for anti-Cuban terrorism?

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

Havana. November 18, 2005

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD—Special for Granma Internacional—

THE December 30, 1960 edition of Hoy newspaper, quoting anti-terrorist investigators of the time, states that the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FRD), a counterrevolutionary organization answering to the CIA led by "Tony" Varona from Miami, "has lost some of its active agents" with the arrest, on the 26th of that month, of terrorist Carlos Alberto Montaner at his home on 309 88th Street, of what used to be the very exclusive Havana neighborhood of Miramar, along with two accomplices, Néstor Manuel Piñango Pérez and Alfredo Carrión Obeso.

Months after he departed Cuba under the protection of his Miami godfathers, Montaner confirmed during an interview with journalist Ángel de Jesús Piñera from Avance magazine, published on April 27, 1962 – and conveniently dug up recently by my colleague Raúl Gómez, of Rebelión website – that he used to belong to Rescate Estudiantil (Student Rescue), defined by experts as the "student wing" of the terrorist FRD.

And he revealed to this journalist that "he shared the national leadership of Action and Sabotage" of that group with the aforementioned Alfredo Carrión Obeso.

In a reply to Granma Internacional, published on August 16 of this year simultaneously in the Miami Herald, the El País of Madrid and the CANF terrorist’s own website, Montaner expands on the information – trying to dilute the gravity of what, during the 1960s, he considered his feats – confirming the name of a third accomplice: Jorge Víctor Fernández. In order to go a little bit deeper, Montaner may be reminded that the second last name of this individual is Romero.

The FRD that was overseeing the activities of Carrión’s group and Montaner was created by CIA official E. Howard Hunt (the one from Watergate) and Manuel "Tony" Varona, former prime minister and former senate president of Cuba, in order to carry out terrorist actions against the brand-new Revolution.

Hunt closely collaborated with his buddy David Atlee Philips, who was directing CIA activities in Havana at the time.

Associated with the capos Santos Trafficante and Johnny Roselli, Varona participated in an attempt to poison Cuban President Fidel Castro, with capsules developed by the CIA containing germs for a fatal strain of botulism. And his name appears in the archives of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, along with those of other terrorists, like Luis Posada Carriles, Guillermo Novo Sampoll and Orlando Bosch.

The FRD would later merge with Manuel Artime Bueza’s Revolutionary Recovery Movement (MRR). Declassified CIA documents and confessions from former mercenaries confirm that both groups were always subordinate to the CIA, its guidance and its financing.

One thing that is certain is that in the January 18, 1961 edition of Revolución newspaper, the names appear of the four FRD/Rescate Estudiantil appear under the announcement that "in trial No. 6-61, regarding the matter of crimes of destruction and possession of flammable materials in which Carlos Alberto Montaner Suris, Alfredo Carrión Obeso, Néstor Manuel Piñango Pérez and Víctor Jorge Fernández Romero were charged, they were sentenced to 20 years in prison, respectively."

The boastful Montaner, in order to pump up his personal mystique, always refers to a death sentence supposedly meted out to him by the prosecution, and to his "30-year" prison sentence. That is simply false.

The text of the sentence, as it was reported by Hoy, reads: "These terrorists had formed a group of counterrevolutionaries directed from outside the country, dedicated to the terrorist activity of planting bombs in the cities of Marianao and Havana. When these elements were arrested, authorities confiscated from them a large quantity of bombs, weapons, dynamite, fuse and white phosphorous."

Montaner would later remember that, after carrying out their actions, the members of the FRD’s "student wing" would meet at the house of Carrión Obeso, at the corner of 86-A and 3rd in Miramar, just one block from Montaner’s residents, where the explosive materials were confiscated from them.

In its December 30 edition, Hoy was even more specific when it stated that the search of Montaner’s house turned up, in addition, a STAR machine gun, detonators, and two pairs of militia member’s pants and shirts, "surely used to disguise themselves as rebel soldiers."

The charges of destruction and possession of flammable materials were part of the anti-terrorist legislation established during that period in response to the dirty war being waged by the United States, which, that same year, reached an extremely high level.

In order to realize the gravity of the events, it must be emphasized that newspaper articles at the time – just two years after the revolutionary victory against the bloody Fulgencio Batista dictatorship and just four months after the Bay of Pigs invasion – were reporting that between the months of September and December of 1960, more than 100 actions of sabotage and other terrorist attacks were carried out against the Cuban people.

Just in the month of December, 1960, in the City of Havana, when Montaner and his accomplices were arrested, there were reports of a fire on the 15th of that month at radio station CMQ in the capital; a bomb that went off in the University of Havana, seriously injuring a student; a fire at the Cándido movie theater in Marianao, with seven young people injured, and the attack on the Flogar department store, where several children were hurt after a bomb went exploded.

When Montaner trumpets that in 1962 he "shared the national leadership of Action and Sabotage for the Rescate Estudiantil group," he is confessing that he participated in terrorist actions, which is what the words "action and sabotage" mean.

On Saturday, December 24 of 1960, a few hours before Christmas, in the popular Flogar department store located on Galiano and San Rafael streets in Havana, 13-year-old Juan René Maragosa was seriously injured, along with his sister Marta and his mother, Alicia, by a strong explosion that threw them to the ground.

Montaner was arrested 48 hours after that terrorist act. Technically a minor at the moment of his arrest – he was born in 1943, and is now 62 – Montaner was taken to the Torrens National Juvenile Detention Center, a low-security site, which allowed him to easily escape a few months later with the help of a mercenary from the Escambray mountains, Rafael Gerada, and then take refuge in the Honduran Embassy. On September 8, 1961, he left Cuba headed for Miami, with a safe-conduct pass granted by the Venezuelan government at the request of his Miami bosses.

The Miami Herald columnist should be reminded that in Cuba, terrorism convictions do not expire. Carlos Alberto Montaner continues to be a fugitive of Cuban justice with a sentence to be carried out.

"We were arrested just as we had begun to try to help the campesino guerrillas in the Escambray," Montaner says in his August article. For those who don’t know anything about Cuban history, that little remark by the Miami Herald columnist may seem insignificant but for those who know about the atrocities committed in the Cuban Escambray by CIA mercenaries, the confession is a scandalous one.

In those mountains, located in the country’s central region, mercenary bands organized and financed by the CIA, with the collaboration of organizations like the FRD, MRR and Alpha 66 – well-known by Montaner – that had their base on U.S. territory itself, dedicated themselves to sowing panic and distrust in the countryside by burning schools; robbing; killing teachers, campesinos and agricultural workers, and destroying entire families.

Will Montaner continue lying by denying that he led terrorist operations, when he publicly boasted in 1962 of having led the Action and Sabotage section of Tony Varona’s FRR/Rescate Estudiantil? Will he ever confirm that he participated in supply operations for the mercenary troops of the Escambray, as he openly confessed 43 years ago? Will he admit that he was a terrorist and that he actively collaborated with the CIA?