One lawyer's secret diplomacy with Castro: Column

More than 50 years before the deal that sent three Cuban spies back to Havana for U.S. aid contractor Alan Gross and a chance for diplomatic relations capped off by President Obama's visit to the island Sunday, the United States and Cuba made a much bigger trade that promised to break the hardening tensions between the two nations.

It involved New York lawyer James Donovan, who engineered the trade that brought captured U.S. spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers for convicted Soviet spy Rudolph Abel, and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. At stake were the fates of 1,100 captured anti-Cuban soldiers who were captured in the unsuccessful April 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

Donovan, who was played by Tom Hanks in last fall's film about the Abel-Powers swap, Bridge of Spies, worked on behalf of the families of the captured rebel soldiers.

Donovan's mission, spurred by his success with Abel and Powers, had been recruited by the Cuban Families Committee, a group of relatives of the prisoners and their supporters.

In a June 19, 1962 meeting, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the brother of President John F. Kennedy, advised the families to hire Donovan. The next month, Robert Kennedy and Donovan met with administration lawyers the next month to determine that Donovan's work would not violate the Logan Act, the 1799 law that prohibits private citizens from conducting foreign policy.

Leery of Donovan working solo, CIA Director John McCone created an agency task force called Project Moses, which was led by an agency attorney, to aid Donovan and keep an eye on him.

After obstacles caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and Donovan's unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate in New York, the talks continued. Eventually, the Cubans agreed to return the prisoners, thousands of family members and other captives for a total of 9,703 people released. In exchange, the Cubans received $2.9 million in ransom money for the prisoners, tons of surplus food and milk from the United States and drugs donated by a variety of U.S. pharmaceutical companies.

The CIA also spent $4 million on "secret" payments to families of Cuban Brigade members over a 20-month period, agency records show.

Donovan's swap and the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, opened a brief window for improved relations with Castro.

Donovan, CIA records show, returned to Cuba. He met with Castro between April 5 and 9, 1963, a visit that included taking his son with him and a fishing and skin diving outing to the Bay of Pigs with Castro.

"In his discussions with Donovan, Castro apparently wanted to determine how relationships could be established with the United States," wrote CIA associate general counsel Milan Miskovsky in an April 13, 1963, memo to McCone. Some Cuban officials, Miskovsky wrote, wanted closer ties with the United States while others "were unalterably opposed."

Meanwhile, the Kennedy administration had never given up on trying to oust Castro. A government-wide task force, the Interdepartmental Coordinating Committee on Cuban Affairs, which included the Defense and State departments, the CIA and other agencies, met frequently to devise plans for raids on Cuba by exile groups, low-level reconnaissance flights, a U.S. invasion and a coup against Castro.

One member of that committee was then-Lt. Col. Alexander Haig, who was charged with repatriating the returned prisoners and placing them in either the military, CIA or other jobs. Haig also coordinated some of the planning for U.S. military action in Cuba. Haig would later become President Richard Nixon's chief of staff and secretary of State in the Reagan administration.

The proposed opening in relations never happened. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, a murder that many still believe involved Castro. New President Lyndon Johnson never cared much for the operation and let it fizzle.

But the operation and its aftermath remained a tightly held secret. A CIA study commissioned in 1973 called the Family Jewels mentioned Project Moses obliquely. A June 1, 1973, memo by Walter Elder, McCone's former executive assistant, listed it as one of "three examples of using Agency fund which I know to be controversial." An internal CIA history of McCone's tenure, which included many details of Cuba policy, was only declassified by the agency last year.

As the United States and Cuba gradually remove the barriers erected between them over the last 55 years, expect us to learn more about Donovan's mission as well as other surprises in the complicated relationship between the two nations.

Ray Locker is the Washington enterprise editor of Paste BN and author of Nixon's Gamble: How a President's Own Secret Government Destroyed His Administration.