The Grinch Who Stole Castro

Covering Senator George McGovern's visit to Havana two years ago. Reporter Barbara Walters extracted a promise from Fidel Castro: the Cuban leader would give her his first major interview for American television. Thus Castro personally chauffeured Walters around the island over a four-day period last month, and ABC will present the choicest hour of their conversation this Thursday (10 p.m. E.D.T.). But somebody got to Fidel first.

The grinch who stole Castro is Bill Moyers, the former press secretary to Lyndon Johnson who a year ago left public television to become chief correspondent for CBS Reports. He did not set out to make Castro break his promise, but when Moyers was in Cuba last January filming a documentary, Castro showed up and wanted to talk--for 15 1/2 hours, it turned out. Not to worry, Barbara. Says Moyers: "Even if Castro had come out and told me that he personally handed the rifle to Lee Harvey Oswald, our interviews wouldn't be competitive."

Castro's filmed remarks for Moyers end up as short segments in a remarkable two-hour documentary, The CIA'S Secret Army, to be aired Friday (9 p.m. E.D.T.). The army--more than 600 CIA staff officers and 2,000 Cuban exiles based in Miami--was secretly formed by John F. and Robert Kennedy a few weeks after the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, according to Moyers. Its mission: to destroy the Cuban economy and assassinate Castro. Over the years, while the Miami police, the FBI and the Coast Guard looked the other way, tens of thousands of commando groups set sail from "safe" Miami waterfront homes for Cuba. Some of the group still in Miami were responsible for Watergate crimes; others continue to pursue an unofficial campaign of anti-Castro terrorism today. That campaign has included a number of recent bombings, both in and out of the U.S., and a bomb explosion on an Air Cubana flight last October that killed 73 people. In telling the story of this enterprise, the CBS program offers several vivid vignettes:

> Masked Cuban exiles showing off for a CBS camera an awesome stockpile of weapons in their Miami armory.

>Richard Bissell, a former CIA chief of covert operations, coolly describing to Moyers how the White House orders assassinations: "A President typically says he wants to get rid of somebody."

> The touching confusion of Watergate burglar Rolando Martinez: "There I was, a Cuban, in contact with the Navy, with the Coast Guard, with the FBI, with the CIA, with all the authorities. Suddenly I found myself in jail. Where was the country?"

Freelance Writer George Crile III interested Moyers in the CIA'S secret army after he had done two years of research in and around Little Havana, the home in Miami of 500,000 Cubans. Moyers then worked with Crile for nine more months. The documentary makes no moral judgments. "I wasn't so much trying to tell the viewer anything as to illustrate the process of Government," says Moyers. "I remember how when I was in Washington we raced into decisions, heedless of cause and effect."

The week Moyers was in Cuba, he was being widely mentioned as Jimmy Carter's choice to head the CIA--the very agency, as his documentary describes, that for more than a decade tried to assassinate the man he was interviewing. At the end of their hours together, Castro asked the reporter if he would accept the CIA job. Moyers promised that he would still be a journalist when they met again. "That'll be better," said Castro, who had a brief fling as a muckraking reporter in Havana before the revolution. "Journalism is beautiful."

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