Former CIA director, James
Woolsey:
“For example, we know now from Soviet documents that were
released or stolen after the Cold War ended, that Castro pushed very hard
during the Cuban Missile Crisis for essentially there be a nuclear war. Happily
he did not care if Cuba would be destroyed. He wanted so much
that the United States be destroyed, and he was not even
a religious fanatic. He was just a fanatic sociopath. That almost tipped
things into a tragic direction, but happily on the other side the Soviet
Union was basically a bunch of thugs with a cover story their ideology was
very substantially dead.”
Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies at 90
Some of
the feedback I got was that I was quoting the former director of the CIA
as if he were an unreliable source . Well,
I would always trust the former
CIA director over the KGB or Cuban sources. But to show how widely accepted
this piece of info is, here is The New York
Times
Unaware of Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s
progress toward a deal, at 2 a.m. on Oct. 27, Mr. Castro decided to write to
Khrushchev, encouraging him to use his nuclear weapons to destroy the United
States in the event of an invasion. At 3 a.m., he arrived at the Soviet Embassy
and told Alekseev that they should go into the bunker beneath the embassy
because an attack was imminent. According to declassified Soviet cables, a
groggy but sympathetic Alekseev agreed, and soon they were set up underground
with Castro dictating and aides transcribing and translating a letter.
Mr. Castro became frustrated,
uncertain about what to say. After nine drafts, with the sun rising, Alekseev
finally confronted Mr. Castro: are you asking Comrade Khrushchev to deliver a
nuclear strike on the United States? Mr. Castro told him, “If they attack Cuba,
we should wipe them off the face of the earth!” Alekseev was shocked, but he
dutifully assisted Mr. Castro in fine-tuning the 10th and final draft of the
letter.
