State Security Agencies: a response to strategies of aggression

Although there was little to debate on in the meeting, the then powerful head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, closed with the following remarks:
"We have to prevent Castro’s victory" and he withheld from confessing that for several months, he had been taking radical measures in pursuit of this objective."

Right from the beginning, US espionage considered that the Cuban leader had such extraordinary qualities, that he was the lynch pin for the revolution to triumph. Because of this, accomplishing his physical elimination was a fundamental aim and sometime that US espionage had been plotting for more than 50 years, concocting 600 plans and attempts to attack the Commander-in-Chief.

While this meeting was taking place in Washington, the North American Aller
Robert Nye failed in his attempt to mislead the bearded men in the Sierra Maestra with his facade of youthful idealism and his insistence that would like to fight beside Fidel Castro. It was suspicious when with total immunity he evaded the siege of the army and presented himself in the rebel camp, hiding his true identity as an FBI agent and sniper, serving Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship.

Five days after that meeting of top officials in the North American government, Nye was arrested with a gun with telescopic vision, with which he confessed that he was contemplating assassinating the Commander-in-Chief, and this with the complicity of the Batista army and support from the North American secret services.

That Nye was neutralized so effectively was no fortuitous matter; it was due to the powers of discernment of the Revolution’s top leaders. These men, right from the insurrectional stage, conceived work in the security domain and by August 1958, the then chief of the II Frente Oriental “Frank País”, Commander Raúl Castro, established a Rebel Intelligence Service (the Spanish acronym for which is SIR) to investigate and to keep an eye on “the internal and external security of the Revolutionary Army of 26 July”.

With this fledgling rebel security service, the foundations were laid for the future Security Organs to maintain an indissoluble unity with the people. Its first mission was to guarantee the security of the revolutionary leaders, in particular, to preserve the life of the Commander-in-Chief.

Shortly after the triumph, on 13 January 1959, the repressive bodies run by tyranny were disbanded and by Fidel’s order, the Department of Investigation of the Revolutionary Army (the Spanish acronym for which is DIER) was established on the battlefield of Columbia. This would be nourished by members of the Rebel Army and the Clandestine Struggle, who for the most part, would be young, humble men, with a basic level of education, all under thirty.

Thursday, 26 March 1959 was a day of tremendous activity for the Intelligence Service of the Revolutionary National Police – one of the agencies that together with the DIER tackled enemy work. Why? Because on that day, a plan to assassinate Fidel was taken apart. And the Batistas that had fled to the US participated in this plan.

Some days later, another similar attempt remained without effect. This time with the consent of the Dictator Leonidas Trujillo, of the Dominican Republic, where they were preparing actions aimed at a similar end.

Then Fidel took the decision to merge the group of existing intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies existing at that time, into one body. These organs were the DIER, the National Revolutionary Police (G-2 PNR) and “Marina de Guerra”. The new organ preserved the name of the DIER, and 26 March is taken to be the date on which the State Security Organs were established.

Thus began a long history, bringing 58 years of victories for the security services of the first triumphant Revolution in the Western hemisphere, which would confront and would destroy dozens of strategies conceived by the CIA, for direct aggression, terrorism, criminal uprisings, plans for assassination and subversion against the island.

In actual fact, Allen Dulles, would only hold this position for less than three years after declaring at that meeting held in the Christmas period of 1958, the need to finish off Fidel and the Revolution. So Dulles devoted all his energies to trying to replicate the operation that put an end to the progressive regime of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.

But defeat at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, sealed his fate and he had to abandon office that same year, defeated and humiliated. Little did he know that was only the beginning.