Re: The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas B. Ro
Posted: Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:37 am
CIA's Guano Paradise
"There are three coconut palm trees on Great Swan Island at the present time," the State Department brochure discouragingly told Americans who inquired about retiring to an island paradise in the Caribbean. "There are no poisonous snakes, but the islands are infested with hordes of lizards ranging in size from only an inch to over three feet."
The vision of thirty-six-inch lizards slithering underfoot would likely deter any potential visitor who had written to the State Department for travel information about the little-known Swan Islands, which, on the map, beckon attractively as a speck in the western Caribbean near Honduras.
But the department's brochure, prepared for just such inquiries, had even more hideously disenchanting news. "It has been necessary," it said, "to construct the few houses on the island on piers and to take other steps to keep the lizards from overrunning them."
The water, the brochure added, "is exceptionally clear and blue and abounding in different types of fish. Ocean bathing is considered dangerous as a constant watch must be kept for shark and barracuda."
The State Department's disheartening travel folder might, just possibly, have been prompted by the fact that Great Swan Island, as late as 1964. was the site of a covert CIA radio station broadcasting to Cuba, Mexico, Central America and the northern tier of South America.
Not that any prospective tourist would have been likely to stumble on the island. There is, naturally, no commercial airline service to the CIA's airstrip. The only boat takes five days to ply between Tampa and the island and carries a pungent cargo of bananas and fertilizer. [i] And normally anyone visiting the island must have a secret clearance.
Despite these precautions, the story of the bedeviled efforts to conceal the CIA's hand on Swan Island provides an episode of comic relief.
The Swan Islands are really two islands, Great Swan (usually known simply as Swan Island), which is a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, and Little Swan. There is also a reef, called Bobby Cay. The islands are due south of the western tip of Cuba, and ninety-seven miles north of Punte Patuca, Honduras. They are said to have been named for a seventeenth-century pirate who used them as a base.
Like the lair of Ian Fleming's nefarious Doctor No, the CIA's Caribbean isle is made entirely of guano, the accumulated droppings of sea fowl. The United States has claimed the islands since 1863, but then, so has Honduras.
When the CIA received approval to mount the operation against Cuba that grew into the Bay of Pigs, it was decided first to soften up Castro's island psychologically by means of radio broadcasts.
By 1960 Radio Swan was on the air. Initially, its mission was confined to propaganda broadcasts designed to undermine the Castro regime. Gradually, as the Bay of Pigs invasion planning progressed, the radio station was assigned a more militant role. During the invasion, as has been seen, Radio Swan broadcast coded messages, appeals for uprisings among the Cuban populace and armed forces, and instructions in the art of sabotage. But back in May of 1960, there had to be some public explanation for the mysterious new fifty-kilowatt station that suddenly began to broadcast from Swan Island.
And so it was that something called the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation, then of 437 Fifth Avenue, New York, announced publicly that it had leased land on Swan Island to operate a radio station. (Officials of the line said that the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation had not owned a steamship for ten years.)
Horton H. Heath, who described himself as "commercial manager" of the station, explained that Radio Swan would broadcast music, soap operas and news. "It is strictly a commercial venture," he announced to the press. "We plan to get advertisers. We haven't got any yet, but are negotiating."
But who owned Gibraltar Steamship?
Walter G. Lohr, of Baltimore, who said he was a stockholder, identified the president of Gibraltar as Thomas Dudley Cabot, of Weston, Massachusetts, a banker and the former president of the United Fruit Company, and the director, in 1951, of the State Department Office of International Security Affairs. Appropriately, considering his new capacity, Cabot was also president and director of Godfrey L. Cabot, Inc., the world's largest producer of carbon black.
Another stockholder was publicly identified at the time as Sumner Smith, a Boston businessman who claimed that his family owned Swan Island. Horton Heath explained that the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation was leasing the land for the radio station from Sumner Smith, who was chairman of the board of Abington Textile Machinery Works, 19 Congress Street, Boston.
When a reporter for the Miami Herald reached Smith in Boston in June, 1960, he fended off questions about Radio Swan by saying: "Speak to the government."
But the government professed ignorance of the radio station. In answer to a question at the time, a State Department spokesman had replied: "The only station that I know anything about on Swan Island is a United States Weather Bureau station." (And it was true that the United States had operated such a station on Swan Island intermittently since 1914.)
The United States Information Agency did go so far as to say it had planned a project similar to Radio Swan but had abandoned the idea because of "interference and licensing problems."
Peculiarly, the Federal Communications Commission, which is required by law to license all radio stations operating from United States territory, did not license Radio Swan or the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation.
"We don't know who owns the island," an FCC spokesman explained lamely.
The State Department suffered no such doubts. It firmly listed [ii] Swan Island as a "possession," and had consistently rejected Honduran claims.
And so Gibraltar Steamship and Radio Swan were in operation. It did not take long for Havana, stung by the propaganda broadcasts, to bark back. As early as June 21, 1960, Castro's Radio Mambi, in Havana, complained that "a counterrevolutionary radio station, supported by U.S. dollars, is now active on Swan."
Things were going reasonably smoothly for the CIA, however, until the Hondurans began to get fidgety over the funny business taking place on what they insisted was their mound of guano.
The trouble had its roots in the fact that a 1960 U.S. census had been taken on Swan Island. In March of that year, a two-star admiral had been piped ashore to count noses on Great Swan. (Only birds lived on Little Swan). Rear Admiral H. Arnold Karo, the director of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, stopped off to take the census during a voyage of the survey ship Explorer.
In April, with much fanfare, it was announced in Washington that the population of Swan Island was twenty-eight, a drop of four since 1950. In Tegucigalpa, Honduras, a group of students reacted indignantly to the claim of sovereignty implied by the taking of the 1960 census. They announced plans to organize an expedition to plant their country's flag on Swan Island. And in July, thirteen armed Hondurans arrived off Swan Island. The invaders were repulsed single-handedly by John Hamilton, a Cayman Islander who was the Weather Bureau's native cook.
From their boat, the Hondurans shouted that they were coming ashore to place a marker on the beach claiming Swan Island as their own. "Leave your guns in the boat," the intrepid cook ordered. The Hondurans meekly complied. They came ashore, unarmed, sang the Honduran national anthem, took their own census and planted their flag.
In Washington, the State Department announced solemnly that the government was awaiting a report from its embassy in Tegucigalpa on the illegal landing by the Hondurans.
On Swan Island, the CIA took direct action to smooth things over. It invited the Hondurans to lunch. Horton Heath announced that all was well.
But in October the dispute got into the United Nations. Francisco Milla Bermudez, the permanent Honduran representative to the UN, told the General Assembly, on October 3, that the United States had occupied Swan Island "against the right and will" of his government. "Historically, geographically and juridically," he declared, "the Swan Islands are and always will be Honduran territory."
But the United States claim to the islands was solidly based on guano, specifically the Guano Act of 1856. Under it, the President could issue a certificate when an American citizen discovered guano on an unclaimed island. This gave the discoverer the right to collect and sell the guano, a valuable fertilizer rich in phosphates. The President, at his discretion, could then designate the island as United States territory.
In 1863 such a certificate was issued for Swan Island to the New York Guano Company by Secretary of State Seward, who acted for President Lincoln. Shortly after the turn of the century, the company abandoned the islands. They were claimed in 1904 by Captain Alonzo Adams, an old salt who sailed out of Mobile, Alabama.
In the 1920s Honduras made several passes at the islands, but Washington warned Tegucigalpa to keep off and sent along a copy of Seward's Guano Certificate to back up its territorial claim.
For a time the United Fruit Company harvested coconuts on the island, but the 1955 hurricane swept away all but the three trees alluded to in the State Department travel brochure.
The CIA shared Swan Island with two other branches of the Federal Government: the Weather Bureau and the Federal Aviation Agency. The Weather Bureau maintained a station, staffed by eight men, to take wind direction, wind speed, temperature and humidity pressure. The FAA maintained a high-powered radio beacon as a navigational aid to pilots."
The Weather Bureau people were rotated every three to six months, since they were not allowed to bring their wives and children to Swan Island. A favorite pastime of gourmets among the government men was clonking lobsters over the head with stones in the shallow water.
The CIA set up shop in lizard-proof Quonset huts half a mile from the Weather Bureau compound. They installed their radio equipment in big trailers slung with awnings to protect the delicate electronic gear from the broiling Caribbean sun. The Cayman Islanders, imported as a labor force, lived nearby with their families in a compound called Gliddenville.
In September, 1960, Walter S. Lemmon, the president of the World Wide Broadcasting System, announced that his station, WRUL, would co-operate with Radio Swan in broadcasts to Cuba. World Wide, besides its Manhattan office, had a short-wave station at Scituate, Massachusetts. Since April, WRUL had been broadcasting to Cuba. The programs featured Miss Pepita Riera, a Cuban exile billed as "Havana Rose." Lemmon said Radio Swan would tape and rebroadcast WRUL's programs.
At the same time, Representative Roman C. Pucinski, Chicago Democrat and sponsor of an organization called Radio Free Cuba, announced that his group would also cooperate with World Wide and Radio Swan. Pucinski described Radio Free Cuba as a privately owned group that had six radio stations in Florida, including the Florida Keys, and Louisiana.
During this period, Radio Swan's programs were for the most part recorded in the New York office of the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation. Some prominent Cuban exiles taped programs for the CIA station, including Luis Conte Aguero, a former Havana radio and television commentator.
Havana Radio kept up its counter-barrage. On October 24 Castro's radio attacked the "miserable curs who speak over Radio Swan." In January, 1961, it said: "Radio Swan is not a radio station but a cage of hysterical parrots."
During the invasion, the CIA station was on the air twenty-four hours a day, transmitting romantic- sounding messages in code. At 10:57 P.M. on April 18, for example, the CIA broadcast this cryptic message in Spanish over Radio Swan: "Attention, Stanislaus, the moon is red 19 April."
Even after the invasion had collapsed, Radio Swan continued to broadcast mysterious orders to nonexistent battalions. On April 22 three days after the end of the invasion, Radio Swan ordered various detachments not to surrender -- help was on the way. Orders went out over the air to "Battalion Three" to advance. "Battalion Four and Seven" were told to "proceed to Point Z."
"Mission Alborada," which means reveille in Spanish, was ordered to commence, and Squadrons Four and Five were told to protect it. At the same time, "Air Group Pluto Norte" was told to cover position "Nino Three N/S."
In the swamps and forests around the Bahia de Cochinos, some of the weary brigade survivors who heard the broadcasts as they tried to evade capture by the militia were bitter at what they felt was false encouragement by Radio Swan.
By this time, Radio Swan's cover as a private station owned by the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation had worn perilously thin. A private station that had broadcast messages in code and instructions to troops during a clandestine invasion -- well, it seemed to be time to get out of town.
And that is just what Gibraltar did. It kept an office in Manhattan, but moved the entire operation to Miami in September, 1961. The "steamship" executives moved into rooms 910, 911 and 912 of the Langford Building in downtown Miami. Fred Fazakerley, a spokesman for the Gibraltar line, told a newsman that Horton Heath would be moving to Miami to take over the office. Several pieces of luggage being moved into the suite were marked with the name "George Wass," who was identified as an official of Radio Swan. Gibraltar took this listing in the Miami telephone book: [iii]
Gibraltar SS Corp. Langfrd B1 371-8098.
Then, silently, by a process akin to alchemy, Gibraltar Steamship faded away and was metamorphosed into a brand-new identity -- the Vanguard Service Corporation, "consultants." Radio Swan fluttered into a CIA Valhalla, only to emerge as "Radio Americas."
Oddly, the Vanguard Service Corporation did not bother to move out of Gibraltar's quarters or to change its telephone number. The 1963-64 Miami telephone book still carried the same listing for Gibraltar, but it also carried this listing:
Vanguard Serv Corp consltnts Langfrd B1 371-8098.
With a whole new dramatis personae, Radio Americas, now managed by one Roger Butts, continued to broadcast from Swan Island.
In 1962 an elderly New England couple, Mr. and Mrs. Prince S. Crowell, decided to visit Swan Island. Mr. Crowell's father had been a chemist for a guano company, and the adventurous couple occupied their leisure time with visits far and wide to the scene of bygone guano operations.
"Mr. Crowell had set his heart on going to Swan to continue the guano investigation," Mrs. Crowell wrote later in the Falmouth (Massachusetts) Enterprise. [1]
The couple would not be put off. They contacted Sumner Smith, who agreed to write to "his caretaker, Captain Donald E. Glidden, to make plans for us ... The captain had given us into the care of Mr. Roger Butts, an executive of Vanguard Service Corporation, which manages the commercial station, Radio Americas, on the island."
The Crowells were, apparently. innocently unaware of what they had stumbled into.
Once a week, a CIA plane would leave Miami for Swan Island, and it was the only air link with the United States.
"At last arrangements were made for us to be among the few recent visitors to Swan," Mrs. Crowell wrote. "We flew from Miami in a DC-3, twenty-four-passenger plane with two pilots, the mail, medical supplies, weekly food, several wares for the store, etc. We learned later that we presented some problem. About one half-hour before we were to land, the island found out that no preparation in the line of ramp or ladder had been made to get two aged passengers from the high door of the plane. After much scurrying around and various suggestions, a solution was found. They drove a tractor with a scoop up to the door, raised the scoop, led us onto it, backed away a bit and lowered us. Every available man, woman and child was down to greet us. I was a curiosity indeed, the only female citizen of the United States on the Island."
What happened next was like a scene straight out of a Margaret Rutherford-Alistair Sim film comedy, as the charming couple was turned loose on the CIA's guano island.
"Mr. Butts gave up his home for us, a Quonset hut, five rooms and a bath with hot and cold water," Mrs. Crowell continued.
"The radio station and weather bureau were carefully explained to us, but not comprehended. We were taken swimming in the loveliest water I ever saw ... my especial joy on that trip was the birds; at least one hundred frigate birds, one hundred brown boobies, and twelve red-footed boobies ... Palm warblers ... were around our house all the time and I had an excellent view of a vittelina warbler, Nelson's (denolroica vittelina nelsoni) named for Mr. George Nelson and found only on Swan, I believe. On the runway we enjoyed daily a flock of twenty little blue herons in all stages of color, a few white ibis and one cattle egret. It seemed like home to hear and see one catbird, also one tree swallow.
"One of the technicians led us to a young white booby in its nest. We had to pick our way several hundred yards over jagged sharp coral with great cracks to be crossed."
There was no question that the CIA had gone above and beyond the call of duty to be hospitable to the delightful Massachusetts couple. "When we reluctantly left for home," Mrs. Crowell concluded, "the pilot flew low over and around the islands as a farewell treat. We realized with grateful appreciation that no stone had been left unturned to make our unusual adventure a reality."
A year later, Radio Americas was still on the air from Swan. It called on Cubans to burn cane fields, and to carry matches to be ready for sabotage at all times. It instructed them to go into offices and telephone booths and take the receivers off the hooks to tie up communications. And it urged the people of Cuba to smash as many bottles as possible. The CIA's reported plan was to curtail the island's beer supply by creating a bottle shortage.
In Boston, Sumner Smith maintained he was not sure whether or not he was still a director of the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation. Smith, explaining his family's ownership claim, said that he had foreclosed a mortgage on the island that had been acquired years ago by his father, the late Charles Sumner Smith. Smith said he had since transferred ownership of the island to his four children, and that they in turn had leased the land to Gibraltar for operation of the radio station.
A telephone call was placed to the Vanguard Service Corporation consultants, in Miami late in 1963. "Vanguard Service," said the girl who answered. Roger Butts then came on the line. Mr. Butts explained that Radio Swan was now Radio Americas and was "currently in operation."
"It is a privately owned commercial station operating on Swan Island," he said.
"What happened to the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation?"
"Vanguard is leasing from Gibraltar Steamship on a profit basis. Gibraltar leases from Sumner Smith."
Mr. Butts identified himself as the "vice-president" of Vanguard. "The president and treasurer is Mr. William H. West, Jr., Mr. James Hollingsworth of Palm Beach is the vice-president and Richard S. Greenlee is the secretary."
Mr. Butts was asked how the station was supported. After a long pause he replied: "By income from sponsors."
A call to George O. Gillingham, the public information chief for the Federal Communications Commission, brought this response to an inquiry about the Swan Island station: "It's still operating. We do not license this station. Try the State Department."
Gillingham said yes, the FCC does license stations broadcasting from the United States or its possessions. That is the law of the land. "We don't license government stations," he added.
Was he saying that this was a government station then?
"No, no, no!" the FCC man said. "We don't know what it is. All we know is that it's operating."
_______________
Notes:
i. The boat service is operated by Hamilton Bras., Inc., a Honduran company, according to the State Department brochure.
ii. Most recently in Geographic Report, No. 4, February 7, 1963, The Geographer, Department of State. It should be understood that the State Department claimed U.S. sovereignty over the Swan Islands; this did not mean private individuals could not own property on the island, as the Smith family claimed it did. The State Department brochure on the islands said that a letter from Sumner Smith, dated February 19, 1956, "states that he, as agent, represents certain owners."
iii. There was no listing for Radio Swan.
"There are three coconut palm trees on Great Swan Island at the present time," the State Department brochure discouragingly told Americans who inquired about retiring to an island paradise in the Caribbean. "There are no poisonous snakes, but the islands are infested with hordes of lizards ranging in size from only an inch to over three feet."
The vision of thirty-six-inch lizards slithering underfoot would likely deter any potential visitor who had written to the State Department for travel information about the little-known Swan Islands, which, on the map, beckon attractively as a speck in the western Caribbean near Honduras.
But the department's brochure, prepared for just such inquiries, had even more hideously disenchanting news. "It has been necessary," it said, "to construct the few houses on the island on piers and to take other steps to keep the lizards from overrunning them."
The water, the brochure added, "is exceptionally clear and blue and abounding in different types of fish. Ocean bathing is considered dangerous as a constant watch must be kept for shark and barracuda."
The State Department's disheartening travel folder might, just possibly, have been prompted by the fact that Great Swan Island, as late as 1964. was the site of a covert CIA radio station broadcasting to Cuba, Mexico, Central America and the northern tier of South America.
Not that any prospective tourist would have been likely to stumble on the island. There is, naturally, no commercial airline service to the CIA's airstrip. The only boat takes five days to ply between Tampa and the island and carries a pungent cargo of bananas and fertilizer. [i] And normally anyone visiting the island must have a secret clearance.
Despite these precautions, the story of the bedeviled efforts to conceal the CIA's hand on Swan Island provides an episode of comic relief.
The Swan Islands are really two islands, Great Swan (usually known simply as Swan Island), which is a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, and Little Swan. There is also a reef, called Bobby Cay. The islands are due south of the western tip of Cuba, and ninety-seven miles north of Punte Patuca, Honduras. They are said to have been named for a seventeenth-century pirate who used them as a base.
Like the lair of Ian Fleming's nefarious Doctor No, the CIA's Caribbean isle is made entirely of guano, the accumulated droppings of sea fowl. The United States has claimed the islands since 1863, but then, so has Honduras.
When the CIA received approval to mount the operation against Cuba that grew into the Bay of Pigs, it was decided first to soften up Castro's island psychologically by means of radio broadcasts.
By 1960 Radio Swan was on the air. Initially, its mission was confined to propaganda broadcasts designed to undermine the Castro regime. Gradually, as the Bay of Pigs invasion planning progressed, the radio station was assigned a more militant role. During the invasion, as has been seen, Radio Swan broadcast coded messages, appeals for uprisings among the Cuban populace and armed forces, and instructions in the art of sabotage. But back in May of 1960, there had to be some public explanation for the mysterious new fifty-kilowatt station that suddenly began to broadcast from Swan Island.
And so it was that something called the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation, then of 437 Fifth Avenue, New York, announced publicly that it had leased land on Swan Island to operate a radio station. (Officials of the line said that the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation had not owned a steamship for ten years.)
Horton H. Heath, who described himself as "commercial manager" of the station, explained that Radio Swan would broadcast music, soap operas and news. "It is strictly a commercial venture," he announced to the press. "We plan to get advertisers. We haven't got any yet, but are negotiating."
But who owned Gibraltar Steamship?
Walter G. Lohr, of Baltimore, who said he was a stockholder, identified the president of Gibraltar as Thomas Dudley Cabot, of Weston, Massachusetts, a banker and the former president of the United Fruit Company, and the director, in 1951, of the State Department Office of International Security Affairs. Appropriately, considering his new capacity, Cabot was also president and director of Godfrey L. Cabot, Inc., the world's largest producer of carbon black.
Another stockholder was publicly identified at the time as Sumner Smith, a Boston businessman who claimed that his family owned Swan Island. Horton Heath explained that the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation was leasing the land for the radio station from Sumner Smith, who was chairman of the board of Abington Textile Machinery Works, 19 Congress Street, Boston.
When a reporter for the Miami Herald reached Smith in Boston in June, 1960, he fended off questions about Radio Swan by saying: "Speak to the government."
But the government professed ignorance of the radio station. In answer to a question at the time, a State Department spokesman had replied: "The only station that I know anything about on Swan Island is a United States Weather Bureau station." (And it was true that the United States had operated such a station on Swan Island intermittently since 1914.)
The United States Information Agency did go so far as to say it had planned a project similar to Radio Swan but had abandoned the idea because of "interference and licensing problems."
Peculiarly, the Federal Communications Commission, which is required by law to license all radio stations operating from United States territory, did not license Radio Swan or the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation.
"We don't know who owns the island," an FCC spokesman explained lamely.
The State Department suffered no such doubts. It firmly listed [ii] Swan Island as a "possession," and had consistently rejected Honduran claims.
And so Gibraltar Steamship and Radio Swan were in operation. It did not take long for Havana, stung by the propaganda broadcasts, to bark back. As early as June 21, 1960, Castro's Radio Mambi, in Havana, complained that "a counterrevolutionary radio station, supported by U.S. dollars, is now active on Swan."
Things were going reasonably smoothly for the CIA, however, until the Hondurans began to get fidgety over the funny business taking place on what they insisted was their mound of guano.
The trouble had its roots in the fact that a 1960 U.S. census had been taken on Swan Island. In March of that year, a two-star admiral had been piped ashore to count noses on Great Swan. (Only birds lived on Little Swan). Rear Admiral H. Arnold Karo, the director of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, stopped off to take the census during a voyage of the survey ship Explorer.
In April, with much fanfare, it was announced in Washington that the population of Swan Island was twenty-eight, a drop of four since 1950. In Tegucigalpa, Honduras, a group of students reacted indignantly to the claim of sovereignty implied by the taking of the 1960 census. They announced plans to organize an expedition to plant their country's flag on Swan Island. And in July, thirteen armed Hondurans arrived off Swan Island. The invaders were repulsed single-handedly by John Hamilton, a Cayman Islander who was the Weather Bureau's native cook.
From their boat, the Hondurans shouted that they were coming ashore to place a marker on the beach claiming Swan Island as their own. "Leave your guns in the boat," the intrepid cook ordered. The Hondurans meekly complied. They came ashore, unarmed, sang the Honduran national anthem, took their own census and planted their flag.
In Washington, the State Department announced solemnly that the government was awaiting a report from its embassy in Tegucigalpa on the illegal landing by the Hondurans.
On Swan Island, the CIA took direct action to smooth things over. It invited the Hondurans to lunch. Horton Heath announced that all was well.
But in October the dispute got into the United Nations. Francisco Milla Bermudez, the permanent Honduran representative to the UN, told the General Assembly, on October 3, that the United States had occupied Swan Island "against the right and will" of his government. "Historically, geographically and juridically," he declared, "the Swan Islands are and always will be Honduran territory."
But the United States claim to the islands was solidly based on guano, specifically the Guano Act of 1856. Under it, the President could issue a certificate when an American citizen discovered guano on an unclaimed island. This gave the discoverer the right to collect and sell the guano, a valuable fertilizer rich in phosphates. The President, at his discretion, could then designate the island as United States territory.
In 1863 such a certificate was issued for Swan Island to the New York Guano Company by Secretary of State Seward, who acted for President Lincoln. Shortly after the turn of the century, the company abandoned the islands. They were claimed in 1904 by Captain Alonzo Adams, an old salt who sailed out of Mobile, Alabama.
In the 1920s Honduras made several passes at the islands, but Washington warned Tegucigalpa to keep off and sent along a copy of Seward's Guano Certificate to back up its territorial claim.
For a time the United Fruit Company harvested coconuts on the island, but the 1955 hurricane swept away all but the three trees alluded to in the State Department travel brochure.
The CIA shared Swan Island with two other branches of the Federal Government: the Weather Bureau and the Federal Aviation Agency. The Weather Bureau maintained a station, staffed by eight men, to take wind direction, wind speed, temperature and humidity pressure. The FAA maintained a high-powered radio beacon as a navigational aid to pilots."
The Weather Bureau people were rotated every three to six months, since they were not allowed to bring their wives and children to Swan Island. A favorite pastime of gourmets among the government men was clonking lobsters over the head with stones in the shallow water.
The CIA set up shop in lizard-proof Quonset huts half a mile from the Weather Bureau compound. They installed their radio equipment in big trailers slung with awnings to protect the delicate electronic gear from the broiling Caribbean sun. The Cayman Islanders, imported as a labor force, lived nearby with their families in a compound called Gliddenville.
In September, 1960, Walter S. Lemmon, the president of the World Wide Broadcasting System, announced that his station, WRUL, would co-operate with Radio Swan in broadcasts to Cuba. World Wide, besides its Manhattan office, had a short-wave station at Scituate, Massachusetts. Since April, WRUL had been broadcasting to Cuba. The programs featured Miss Pepita Riera, a Cuban exile billed as "Havana Rose." Lemmon said Radio Swan would tape and rebroadcast WRUL's programs.
At the same time, Representative Roman C. Pucinski, Chicago Democrat and sponsor of an organization called Radio Free Cuba, announced that his group would also cooperate with World Wide and Radio Swan. Pucinski described Radio Free Cuba as a privately owned group that had six radio stations in Florida, including the Florida Keys, and Louisiana.
During this period, Radio Swan's programs were for the most part recorded in the New York office of the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation. Some prominent Cuban exiles taped programs for the CIA station, including Luis Conte Aguero, a former Havana radio and television commentator.
Havana Radio kept up its counter-barrage. On October 24 Castro's radio attacked the "miserable curs who speak over Radio Swan." In January, 1961, it said: "Radio Swan is not a radio station but a cage of hysterical parrots."
During the invasion, the CIA station was on the air twenty-four hours a day, transmitting romantic- sounding messages in code. At 10:57 P.M. on April 18, for example, the CIA broadcast this cryptic message in Spanish over Radio Swan: "Attention, Stanislaus, the moon is red 19 April."
Even after the invasion had collapsed, Radio Swan continued to broadcast mysterious orders to nonexistent battalions. On April 22 three days after the end of the invasion, Radio Swan ordered various detachments not to surrender -- help was on the way. Orders went out over the air to "Battalion Three" to advance. "Battalion Four and Seven" were told to "proceed to Point Z."
"Mission Alborada," which means reveille in Spanish, was ordered to commence, and Squadrons Four and Five were told to protect it. At the same time, "Air Group Pluto Norte" was told to cover position "Nino Three N/S."
In the swamps and forests around the Bahia de Cochinos, some of the weary brigade survivors who heard the broadcasts as they tried to evade capture by the militia were bitter at what they felt was false encouragement by Radio Swan.
By this time, Radio Swan's cover as a private station owned by the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation had worn perilously thin. A private station that had broadcast messages in code and instructions to troops during a clandestine invasion -- well, it seemed to be time to get out of town.
And that is just what Gibraltar did. It kept an office in Manhattan, but moved the entire operation to Miami in September, 1961. The "steamship" executives moved into rooms 910, 911 and 912 of the Langford Building in downtown Miami. Fred Fazakerley, a spokesman for the Gibraltar line, told a newsman that Horton Heath would be moving to Miami to take over the office. Several pieces of luggage being moved into the suite were marked with the name "George Wass," who was identified as an official of Radio Swan. Gibraltar took this listing in the Miami telephone book: [iii]
Gibraltar SS Corp. Langfrd B1 371-8098.
Then, silently, by a process akin to alchemy, Gibraltar Steamship faded away and was metamorphosed into a brand-new identity -- the Vanguard Service Corporation, "consultants." Radio Swan fluttered into a CIA Valhalla, only to emerge as "Radio Americas."
Oddly, the Vanguard Service Corporation did not bother to move out of Gibraltar's quarters or to change its telephone number. The 1963-64 Miami telephone book still carried the same listing for Gibraltar, but it also carried this listing:
Vanguard Serv Corp consltnts Langfrd B1 371-8098.
With a whole new dramatis personae, Radio Americas, now managed by one Roger Butts, continued to broadcast from Swan Island.
In 1962 an elderly New England couple, Mr. and Mrs. Prince S. Crowell, decided to visit Swan Island. Mr. Crowell's father had been a chemist for a guano company, and the adventurous couple occupied their leisure time with visits far and wide to the scene of bygone guano operations.
"Mr. Crowell had set his heart on going to Swan to continue the guano investigation," Mrs. Crowell wrote later in the Falmouth (Massachusetts) Enterprise. [1]
The couple would not be put off. They contacted Sumner Smith, who agreed to write to "his caretaker, Captain Donald E. Glidden, to make plans for us ... The captain had given us into the care of Mr. Roger Butts, an executive of Vanguard Service Corporation, which manages the commercial station, Radio Americas, on the island."
The Crowells were, apparently. innocently unaware of what they had stumbled into.
Once a week, a CIA plane would leave Miami for Swan Island, and it was the only air link with the United States.
"At last arrangements were made for us to be among the few recent visitors to Swan," Mrs. Crowell wrote. "We flew from Miami in a DC-3, twenty-four-passenger plane with two pilots, the mail, medical supplies, weekly food, several wares for the store, etc. We learned later that we presented some problem. About one half-hour before we were to land, the island found out that no preparation in the line of ramp or ladder had been made to get two aged passengers from the high door of the plane. After much scurrying around and various suggestions, a solution was found. They drove a tractor with a scoop up to the door, raised the scoop, led us onto it, backed away a bit and lowered us. Every available man, woman and child was down to greet us. I was a curiosity indeed, the only female citizen of the United States on the Island."
What happened next was like a scene straight out of a Margaret Rutherford-Alistair Sim film comedy, as the charming couple was turned loose on the CIA's guano island.
"Mr. Butts gave up his home for us, a Quonset hut, five rooms and a bath with hot and cold water," Mrs. Crowell continued.
"The radio station and weather bureau were carefully explained to us, but not comprehended. We were taken swimming in the loveliest water I ever saw ... my especial joy on that trip was the birds; at least one hundred frigate birds, one hundred brown boobies, and twelve red-footed boobies ... Palm warblers ... were around our house all the time and I had an excellent view of a vittelina warbler, Nelson's (denolroica vittelina nelsoni) named for Mr. George Nelson and found only on Swan, I believe. On the runway we enjoyed daily a flock of twenty little blue herons in all stages of color, a few white ibis and one cattle egret. It seemed like home to hear and see one catbird, also one tree swallow.
"One of the technicians led us to a young white booby in its nest. We had to pick our way several hundred yards over jagged sharp coral with great cracks to be crossed."
There was no question that the CIA had gone above and beyond the call of duty to be hospitable to the delightful Massachusetts couple. "When we reluctantly left for home," Mrs. Crowell concluded, "the pilot flew low over and around the islands as a farewell treat. We realized with grateful appreciation that no stone had been left unturned to make our unusual adventure a reality."
A year later, Radio Americas was still on the air from Swan. It called on Cubans to burn cane fields, and to carry matches to be ready for sabotage at all times. It instructed them to go into offices and telephone booths and take the receivers off the hooks to tie up communications. And it urged the people of Cuba to smash as many bottles as possible. The CIA's reported plan was to curtail the island's beer supply by creating a bottle shortage.
In Boston, Sumner Smith maintained he was not sure whether or not he was still a director of the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation. Smith, explaining his family's ownership claim, said that he had foreclosed a mortgage on the island that had been acquired years ago by his father, the late Charles Sumner Smith. Smith said he had since transferred ownership of the island to his four children, and that they in turn had leased the land to Gibraltar for operation of the radio station.
A telephone call was placed to the Vanguard Service Corporation consultants, in Miami late in 1963. "Vanguard Service," said the girl who answered. Roger Butts then came on the line. Mr. Butts explained that Radio Swan was now Radio Americas and was "currently in operation."
"It is a privately owned commercial station operating on Swan Island," he said.
"What happened to the Gibraltar Steamship Corporation?"
"Vanguard is leasing from Gibraltar Steamship on a profit basis. Gibraltar leases from Sumner Smith."
Mr. Butts identified himself as the "vice-president" of Vanguard. "The president and treasurer is Mr. William H. West, Jr., Mr. James Hollingsworth of Palm Beach is the vice-president and Richard S. Greenlee is the secretary."
Mr. Butts was asked how the station was supported. After a long pause he replied: "By income from sponsors."
A call to George O. Gillingham, the public information chief for the Federal Communications Commission, brought this response to an inquiry about the Swan Island station: "It's still operating. We do not license this station. Try the State Department."
Gillingham said yes, the FCC does license stations broadcasting from the United States or its possessions. That is the law of the land. "We don't license government stations," he added.
Was he saying that this was a government station then?
"No, no, no!" the FCC man said. "We don't know what it is. All we know is that it's operating."
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Notes:
i. The boat service is operated by Hamilton Bras., Inc., a Honduran company, according to the State Department brochure.
ii. Most recently in Geographic Report, No. 4, February 7, 1963, The Geographer, Department of State. It should be understood that the State Department claimed U.S. sovereignty over the Swan Islands; this did not mean private individuals could not own property on the island, as the Smith family claimed it did. The State Department brochure on the islands said that a letter from Sumner Smith, dated February 19, 1956, "states that he, as agent, represents certain owners."
iii. There was no listing for Radio Swan.