David Christ, Thornton Anderson, and Walter Szuminski were arrested in Havana when they were caught dead to rights in the middle of installing clandestine audio equipment to monitor the New China News Agency office which was about to open there.
The men had traveled to Cuba for a hastily thrown-together mission just as US relations with Fidel Castro’s new government were falling apart. Their alias identities as tourists were only marginally backstopped, and they had no diplomatic cover status to fall back on.
They spent nearly three years imprisoned in Cuba and were interrogated many times. But they never broke under interrogation or revealed the true nature of their mission. Incarcerated alongside thousands of other political prisoners in horrible conditions on a small island just south of Cuba, they watched from their cell windows as the Bay of Pigs invasion began the year after they were first captured, hoping in vain that they would soon be rescued.
The three men found nearly endless ways to resist and even fight back against the Cuban government. As talented engineers, they were able to build a radio receiver by hand from junk found inside the prison, distributed a clandestine newspaper to the rest of the prisoners, and even defused a gigantic bomb buried underneath the compound using razors and a sewing kit. Believing the Cuban government might soon order the execution of everyone at the prison, they organized the prisoners to prepare for a massive escape and constructed a flamethrower and hand grenades to prepare for the coming battle with the armed guards.
For episode 31 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I describe the incredible ordeal that Christ, Anderson, and Szuminski underwent once their mission to Havana went terribly wrong. Despite everything that happened to them, they finally returned home with their lives, and their honor intact.
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