The CIA
The Central Intelligence Agency, better known as the CIA, is the US government agency responsible for compiling, analyzing and using “intelligence” (information) abroad, be it about governments, corporations or individuals who supposedly represent a threat to national security.
When the Cuban revolution triumphed on 1 January 1959, the CIA station in Florida acquired considerable operational significance in conspiratorial actions against Cuba.
During preparations for Operation Zapata (Pluto), approved by President Eisenhower on 17 March 1960, the staff of this station, which was involved in complex missions to undermine the stability of Cuba’s revolutionary government, grew considerably.
Following the defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion and with the advent of Operation Mongoose in 1961, this station, christened with the cryptonym of JM-WAVE, would become the CIA’s main anti-Cuba instrument for subversion, terrorism and intelligence.
When it undertook Operation Mongoose, the Kennedy administration decided to implement changes in the main CIA command posts that bore direct responsibility for the failure of Operation Pluto, an operation that had culminated with the defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
In February 1962, Richard Helms would be appointed the new head of CIA secret services. Someone who had been linked to the agency since its creation, he had not been directly involved in the anti-Cuba plans of Operation Pluto.
Operation Mongoose was imposed upon the CIA as a strategic national security mission, as a chief US foreign policy objective in Latin America and the Caribbean and an essential goal in the East-West conflict. For the United States, annihilating the Cuban revolution was a way of destroying the example it represented, of guaranteeing no other countries followed in its footsteps in the revolutionary struggle, anti-imperialism and, why not, towards a new form of socialism born of the historical, economic, social and cultural conditions which Cuba would expound upon in the 2nd Havana Declaration of February 1962.
To have an approximate picture of the number of organizations involved in Operation Mongoose, it suffices to mention one fact: a declassified CIA document dated 10 October 1962 reports that 415 counterrevolutionary organizations, both within and outside Cuba, were involved. JM-WAVE analysts estimated that, in the United States, there existed 371 counterrevolutionary organizations and groups held in the Opa-Locka detention camp, where the CIA recruited its agents and collaborators in Florida.
From the time of its creation, JM-WAVE violated the fundamental principles of the CIA: to carry out intelligence operations, and other operations of interest to the nation, abroad, never within the United States.
A complex infrastructure was set up in Miami to ensure that the anti-Cuban actions undertaken by JM-WAVE were carried out successfully. Travel agencies, gunsmith’s shops, sport stores, real estate firms and private detective agencies offered services and coverage for the station’s personnel.
In JM-WAVE warehouses, there were weapons of every sort and brand, from just about every country in the world. Polygraph experts, psychologists and doctors were part of the staff. Registered as the property of Zenith Technological Enterprises, hundreds of apartments and luxurious residences were used as safe houses.
The training department trained groups that infiltrated and exfiltrated Cuba. JM-WAVE also had a security, counterintelligence and communications section.
Another fundamental component of the activities coordinated from the station were executive actions, in plain and simple language: the plotting of political assassinations. The executors of these plans included not only CIA agents but also Cuban agents and counterrevolutionary organizations.
Source: “The CIA’s Clandestine Empire: The JM-WAVE Station”, Dr. Jacinto Valdés-Dapena Vivanco, Center for Historic Research, State Security, Cuba (2002).