The Villa Clara raid occurred on 17 April 1961 when a team of American CIA "Black Ops" operatives led by Frank Woods was dispatched to Cuba to assassinate communist leader Fidel Castro amid the chaos of the Bay of Pigs invasion. While Cuban exiles affiliated with "Operation 40" launched a diversionary attack on a nearby airfield, the Black Ops team raided Castro's Villa Clara estate, where they killed Castro's body double Bruno Romero (mistaking him for the dictator himself) before fleeing to the airfield and escaping via plane.
Background[]
In March 1960, after Cuba's communist dictator Fidel Castro nationalized American banking, oil refining, sugar, and coffee businesses and reached out to the Soviet Union for aid amid an American embargo, President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a CIA plan to overthrow Castro. The Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front, a Cuban exile anti-communist organization, formed Brigade 2506 with funding from the CIA and 60 members of the Alabama Air National Guard, and 1,400 paramilitaries were trained in Guatemala and divided into five infantry battalions and one paratrooper battalion. They were scheduled to invade Cuba by boat on 17 April 1961 after a preparatory B-26 raid on Cuban airfields, and they would land at the Playa Giron in the Bay of Pigs before moving inland to overthrow Cuba's revolutionary regime.
At the same time, the CIA activated a "Black Ops" team consisting of Frank Woods, Alex Mason, and Joseph Bowman and dispatched them to Havana to meet with their informant Carlos Gutierrez, who would provide them with intel and a map showing the planned method of attack and an extraction point at a Cuban military airfield. Their objective would be to make their way from Santa Maria to Villa Clara, where Fidel Castro was supposedly hiding with his mistress Frida Mariano.
Operation[]
The Black Ops team's operation was almost compromised when their meeting with Carlos in a Havana bar was interrupted by the sudden arrival of Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) soldiers. Their captain interrogated the civilian-dressed Americans about their origins until Woods impaled his hand to the bar table with a knife, leading to a shootout between the Americans and the Cuban soldiers. The Cuban police responded to the shooting, and the Americans fought their way down the streets, using grenade launchers to destroy their cars. The Americans stole an empty car in an alleyway before escaping down the city streets and through police barricades, and, by that afternoon, they were in position across a large ravine from Castro's Villa Clara estate.
The Black Ops team waited for the US Air Force to initiate its bombing of Cuba to signal the start of the invasion. Eight CIA-supplied B-26 bombers attacked Cuban airfields, prompting the Black Ops team to zipline across the ravine onto the villa grounds as Cuban exiles launched a diversionary attack on the nearby airfield. The Black Ops operatives fought their way through the building, killing dozens of Tropas, and Mason killed Castro's body double Bruno Romero and his mistress Frida Mariano as she reached for the dead Romero's gun. The team fought their way out of the building as American bombs shook the villa, and they were pinned down by a BTR-60 and Cuban reinforcements before Cuban exiles arrived to rout these attackers. Gutierrez, leading the exiles, bade the Americans flee to the airfield and escape aboard one of the planes there. The Americans ran down a cliffside while secured with ropes and helped the exiles fend off the FAR soldiers fighting for the airfield, but CIA agent Mason sacrificed himself by jumping off the plane during its takeoff and using an M60 machine-gun with explosive rounds to destroy an FAR barricade at the end of the runway. Mason was captured by the Cubans and handed over to the Soviet advisors Nikita Dragovich and Lev Kravchenko, who were in Cuba to establish an underwater numbers station from which they controlled sleeper cells in the United States. Mason realized the mission's failure when he saw Castro himself meeting with the Russians. Ultimately, the Bay of Pigs invasion proved a failure as well.