Not long after the first anniversary of Fidel Castro coming to power, Vice President Richard Nixon was “becoming very active and aggressive” about US. policy toward Cuba with the help of the CIA.
According to declassified FBI memo, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, told a Bureau agent in January 1960 that agency officials had held “lengthy conversations with Nixon and other official concerning a ‘getting tough’ policy” toward Castro’s new communist government. One source expressed the belief that “the Castro problem … will not be resolved in a matter of weeks or months.”
The document comes from extraordinary collection of FBI documents: the Bureau’s file on “political matters” file related to Cuba from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Known the “109 file”, the documents are a chronological collection of memos, reports, and other documents on pro and anti-Castro groups in the United States under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.
As the United States and Cuba pursue normal relations in 2016, the secret history of the long conflict is finally coming to light. The 109 files illuminate why the two countries were so alienated for so long.
The documents were flushed into the open by the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, DC led by Jim Lesar, the veteran Freedom of Information Act litigator.The Mary Ferrell site has posted over 10,000 pages of these files, with more to come.
Most of these records are completely unavailable elsewhere; less than 10 percent are available at the National Archives and Records Administration or previously on the Mary Ferrell site.
See: Featured: New FBI Cuba Documents.
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