The Longest Romance (2 page)

Besides plugging Moore's
Sicko
, CNN's “Special Report” also featured medical expert Gail Reed, introduced on screen as “someone who's lived and worked in Cuba for decades.” “They [the Cubans] concentrate on prevention,” she explained to CNN viewers. “They concentrate on bringing services closer to people's homes. When I first came to Cuba in the 70's, I was very impressed with their efforts in building a new kind of society,” Reed explained.

Most of her companions at the time were also impressed; like Bill Ayers's wife Bernardine Dohrn. As it happens, Gail Reed visited Cuba as a member of the
Venceremos
Brigades, the starry-eyed college kids who visited ostensibly to cut sugar-cane and help build Cuban socialism, a volunteer Peace Corps of sorts. Or so we were led to believe.

In fact the
Venceremos
Brigades were a joint venture between Castro's KGB-mentored DGI (Central Intelligence) and the U.S. terrorist group known as The Weathermen, which included Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Larry Grathwohl.
⁹

You've probably never heard of Grathwohl. But he looked just the part at the time. He was a ringer for Country Joe McDonald of Woodstock fame (“well it's one two three, what are we fighting for”). But Grathwohl was actually a proud Vietnam combat veteran
recently recruited by the FBI and tasked with penetrating the Weathermen.

CNN's Morgan Neill could have fluffed up
Venceremos
brigadista Gail Reed's credentials by adding that from 1993 to 1997 she was a regular correspondent for
Business Week
magazine; that from 1994 to 1996 she served as a Havana-based producer for NBC News; and that today she contributes to
The Huffington Post.
When Andrea Mitchell, NBC's chief foreign-affairs correspondent, interviewed Gail Reed in Havana in April 2012 for an MSNBC report, Mitchell introduced her as “international director of the nonprofit group Medical Education Cooperation.”

All true. But for the past 34 years Havana resident Gail Reed has also been married to an officer of Cuba's DGI named Julian Torres Rizo. Reed is also a regular contributor to
Granma
, which is the
Pravda
of Cuba. In 1991 Reed was tasked by the Castro regime with writing its official “Island in the Storm: the Cuban Communist Party's Fourth Congress,” a not inconsiderable honor.
¹⁰

She served in all these capacities while working for
Business Week
and NBC, by the way. Not that any American reader or viewer imbibing her reports on the marvels of Cuba's health-care and the wicked U.S. blockade of her adopted country might have guessed her background.

In early 1983, when Grenada's Marxist leader Maurice Bishop was planning a propaganda tour of the U.S., Castro appointed Gail Reed as Cuba's special emissary to his new ally. Her job was to advise Bishop on how to handle (i.e., charm and bamboozle) the U.S. media. And let's face it; who better than Reed's boss to proffer such advice?

The partnership between this future CNN, NBC and
Business Week
correspondent with Castro's secret police began in 1969 with those visits to Cuba as a member of the (DGI-created)
Venceremos
Brigades. This was also the beginning of Reed's romance with DGI officer Julian Torres Rizo. The terrorist offshoot from the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) known as the Weathermen,
and staffed most famously by Barack Obama's future neighbors Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, served as the DGI's U.S. recruitment officers, and their job proved easy. In that heady Age of Aquarius, hundreds of starry-eyed college kids were volunteering to “help build Cuban socialism” and “fight U.S. imperialism,” mostly by joyfully cutting Cuban sugar-cane.

Castro's DGI had other goals in mind. “The ultimate objective of the DGI's participation in the setting up of the Venceremos Brigades,” says an FBI report declassified in 1976, “was the recruitment of individuals who are politically oriented and who someday may obtain a position, elective or appointive, somewhere in the U.S. Government, which would provide the Cuban Government with access to political, economic and military intelligence.... A very limited number of VB members have been trained in guerrilla warfare techniques, including use of arms and explosives,” the report said. “This type of training is given only to individuals who specifically request it.”

“I don't regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers wrote 30 years later. “I feel we didn't do enough.”
¹¹
Three months after Dohrn's return from a
Venceremos
junket to Cuba, the Weathermen were busy in their Greenwich Village townhouse dutifully constructing a huge bomb destined for the Officers Club in Fort Dix, New Jersey.

But the bomb went off in their hands, blowing three of them to smithereens. So maybe Castro's bomb-trainers didn't do enough either? That, or their Weatherman pupils were tragically inattentive during an important session.

A week earlier, however, a Weatherman bomb had gone off as planned in San Francisco's Park Police Station, wounding nine and killing police officer Brian V. McDonnell. Larry Grathwohl, the Country Joe look-alike and the FBI's top mole within the Weathermen at the time, testified under oath that Bill Ayers boasted to him that Bernardine Dohrn had planted the bomb. When police raided the Weathermen's San Francisco bomb-factory
they found Dohrn's fingerprints everywhere, along with those of Bill Ayers himself“
¹²

Claims years later (especially during the first Obama presidential campaign) by Ayers and Dohrn, that their bombs were merely overgrown firecrackers meant to make noise and attract attention to their humanitarian cause, don't pan out, Grathwohl says:

“Bill Ayers specifically stated that the bombs should be placed when and where the greatest number of police officers would be killed. He specified that they should contain shrapnel, nails and wood staples, and should fire off propane tanks. Their intention was unmistakably to kill people. In fact, one of the devices found in the Pine Street bomb-factory location was a voice-activated detonator, meaning that it was designed to explode only at the nearby sound of a human voice.”
¹³

In September 1970 Larry Grathwohl foiled two more attempts with similar bombs. These were against the Detroit Police Officers Association, whose building was adjacent to a Red Barn Restaurant usually packed with diners, mostly blacks.

“When I objected to Billy Ayers that more innocent people would be killed in the restaurant,” recalls Grathwohl, “he replied, ‘Innocent people have to die in a revolution.'”

After the bombings and an FBI crackdown, the Weathermen went underground. According to Grathwohl, this is when Bill Ayers's services as a conduit between his fellow terrorists and Castro's DGI really kicked in. The heat was on, so Ayers instructed all comrades, including Grathwohl, to contact the Cuban embassy in Canada and use the code name “Delgado” to communicate with each other and for safe passage to and from Cuba through Czechoslovakia.

“They weren't out to change the system,” testified Grathwohl. “They were out to destroy it, to completely destroy it. That's what they said the first time I met them, and that's what they said the last time I was with them.”

“You come from a society that must be destroyed,” stressed Julian Torres Rizo to the
Venceremos
brigadistas he was training in Cuba to make bombs, as he'd been trained by the KGB. This boyfriend and future husband of CNN,
Business Week
, NBC and
Huffington Post
correspondent Gail Reed then admonished: “It's your job to destroy your society.”
¹⁴

CHAPTER 1

T
he proverbial Man from Mars visits New York in February 1957, picks up the world's most prestigious newspaper and on the front page reads: “Fidel Castro is humanist, a man of many ideals including those of liberty, democracy and social justice ... the need to restore Cuba's constitution and to hold elections.”

Herbert Matthews, Latin America expert for
The New York Times
, had briefly “embedded” himself in Cuba's hills during a guerrilla war, interviewed the Cuban guerrilla leader himself and come away with the scoop. “Cuban Rebel Is visited in Hideout,” reads the headline.

“You can be sure we hold no animosity towards the United States,” he quotes Fidel Castro. “Above all we are fighting for a democratic Cuba and an end to dictatorship.”

“What we do know today, in spite of the censorship, is that Cuba is undergoing a reign of terror,” reports Herbert Matthews in the same piece. “This is an overworked phrase, but it is a literal truth so far as the regime of General Batista is concerned.... ” “It amounts to a new deal for Cuba,” Matthews said of Castro's program, “radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist.”

Visiting two years later the Martian discovers from another
New York Times
Latin America expert that Fidel Castro assumed power and events are playing out exactly as predicted by his
colleague: “Castro's promise of social justice brings a foretaste of human dignity for millions of Cubans who had little knowledge of it in Cuba's former
near-feudal
economy,” wrote New York Times' reporter Tad Szulc from Havana in February 1959. (emphasis mine)

“Cuba is now a happy island,” chimed in Herbert Matthews. Happily that “reign of terror” was finally over and done. Dickey Chapelle over at
Reader's Digest
concurred. “The Cuba of Fidel Castro today is free from terror,” she wrote in April 1959. “Civil liberties have been restored in Cuba and corruption seems to be drying up. These are large steps forward, and they were made against fearful odds.”

Putting down
Reader's Digest
the Martian picks up
The Washington Post
to read from renowned pundit and Pulitzer Prizewinner Walter Lippmann: “It would be a great mistake even to intimate that Castro's Cuba has any real prospect of becoming a Soviet satellite.”

Moving over to
Newsweek
, our Martian reads that “Castro is honest, and an honest government is something unique in Cuba. Castro is not himself even remotely a Communist.”

The Martian visits again a generation later, in 1996, to find that this same Fidel Castro is visiting New York for the UN's 50th-anniversary celebration. “The Toast of Manhattan!” reads the
Time
magazine headline covering the visit. “The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!” reads the one by
Newsweek.
He reads on to learn that parties, luncheons and assorted celebrations rage in Fidel Castro's honor Manhattan-wide, with millionaire pundits, businessmen and politicians spanning the American political spectrum clamoring for his autograph, everywhere from the head offices of
The New York Times
and
The Wall Street Journal
to the Council on Foreign Relations.

First, there was a luncheon at the Council on Foreign Relations. After holding court there for a rapt David Rockefeller, along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas and Random House's Harold Evans, Castro flashed over to Mort Zuckerman's Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway
glitterati
, including Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Dan Rather, Bernard Shaw and Barbara Walters, all jostled for photo-ops and Castro's autograph. Diane Sawyer was so overcome in his presence that she rushed up, broke into that toothy smile of hers, wrapped her arms around Castro and smooched him warmly on the cheek.
¹

Fast-forward to 2009, and the Martian again visits the U.S., which recently elected the candidate of its majority political party as president. “How can we help President Obama?” he reads that Fidel Castro is asking from Cuba. “Fidel Castro really wants President Obama to succeed,” continues the article, quoting officials from one of the U.S. legislature's most powerful assemblies, the Congressional Black Caucus, who were visiting Cuba.
²