In late October 1959, a Mexican spy named Eduardo Diaz Silveti slipped into the US Embassy in Mexico Metropolis. Tall and well-spoken with slicked-back hair, Silveti, 30, descended from a household of bullfighters. He had realized spycraft on the Federal Safety Directorate, or DFS, Mexico’s secret police. Through the Chilly Conflict, the capital had develop into so overrun by Communist spies that the CIA had enlisted the assistance of the Mexican secret companies of their battle in opposition to the Soviet Union. “I needed to go … to the seventh flooring,” Silveti recalled throughout an interview with Tercer Milenio, a Mexican tv program that aired in 2019. “And there was Scott.”
Winston Scott, 49, was the primary secretary of the US Embassy. That was his cowl; he was additionally the CIA’s most revered spymaster in Latin America. Secrets and techniques had been a stock-in-trade for the silver-haired Alabaman: a former FBI cryptographer, he had arrived in Mexico Metropolis in 1956 and turned the CIA station into one of the vital profitable counterespionage operations on the earth. He tapped the telephones of the Soviet and Cuban embassies, managed the airport, and even recruited Mexico’s President López Mateos as a precious informant, marshalling the merciless and corrupt spies of the DFS into foot troopers in America’s warfare with Moscow. He had referred to as Silveti to his workplace, in line with the Mexican, to supply him a top-secret mission that was “tremendously obligatory for the US.”
In the event that they received issues incorrect, Scott warned that “World Conflict III might start,” Silveti stated.
Excessive stakes
Weeks earlier, on October four of 1959, a pillar of fireside lit up the sky above the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, a distant Soviet area facility. That evening, a Soviet Luna 8K72 rocket roared into the sky trailing a plume of white exhaust. Because it reached the sting of the ambiance and shed its booster rockets, the cone-shaped higher stage opened like a Russian doll, giving beginning to a smaller area probe: Luna 3. The craft was the dimensions of a big rubbish can, and probably essentially the most refined machine ever despatched into area. Its 4 insect-like antennae acquired radio alerts from the Soviets, who guided it on a journey to see what no human had ever set eyes on—the far facet of the moon.
For 2 days, the Luna sailed by way of area, till on October 7, it disappeared behind the moon for 40 minutes. Onboard, the Luna boasted a digital camera, computerized movie processor, and a scanner, and when it boomeranged again previous Earth, it transmitted 17 pictures of the moon’s hidden face. In Moscow, the Soviets celebrated their newest area victory over America.
It had been two years for the reason that Soviets launched Sputnik 1, the primary artifical object in area. Because it orbited over Kansas, Iowa, and New York, curious People tuned their automobile stereos to listen to its digital sign. Folks feared that if the Soviets might shoot probes across the Earth and Moon, they might simply drop a nuclear bomb onto Washington or Los Angeles. In response, the US constructed rockets and American youngsters realized to cower below their college desks in atomic bomb drills.
American newspapers prompt that the Luna was a hoax and referred to as it, incorrectly, “Lunik,” like Sputnik. In response, the Russian information company Tass launched the Luna’s pictures, and a map of the moon’s far facet with notes in Russian.
“President Eisenhower … he’s in a panic,” Scott stated, in line with Silveti’s Tercer Milenio interview. Eisenhower had spent $110 million—almost a billion in immediately’s {dollars}—making an attempt to launch his personal Sputnik, however was dropping endurance: the CIA’s CORONA program was a secret embarrassment. Seven rockets had failed, misfired, or tumbled into the Pacific ocean with out even reaching orbit: in the meantime a Soviet astronaut was already in coaching to stroll on the moon. The Luna spacecraft contained the secrets and techniques to the Soviet’s success, and, Scott stated, there was a chance on the horizon to steal them.
The boastful Soviets had despatched their Luna rockets on a world tour. At one exhibition in New York, American spies had confirmed {that a} Luna on show was legit. The CIA plotted to kidnap the spacecraft, loot it, and put it again with out the Soviets understanding. However they dared not tamper with it on American soil.
Then the CIA realized that on November 21 the Soviet exhibition was headed to the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico Metropolis. An intercepted transport manifest described “fashions of astronomic equipment.” The scale of the crate matched the Luna rocket: 17 ft lengthy and eight ft huge. Jackpot. The CIA simply wanted a number of hours alone to disassemble, {photograph}, scrape the rocket for remnants of liquid gas, and examine the elements for manufacturing facility markings that would give them intelligence on Soviet operations.
Silveti had causes to show down the project. In keeping with his e book, Secuestro (Hijack), revealed in Spanish with writer Francisco Perea in 1987, Silveti’s spouse was terminally sick. He now labored for the Presidential Common Employees, and his brother Alberto was the personal secretary to President Mateos. Political embarrassment could be a catastrophe, for the reason that Mexican authorities tried to current itself as a pal to each the united states and America. However in a manner, Mexico Metropolis was the proper place to steal a rocket the dimensions of a college bus from beneath the noses of the Soviet secret police.
“I requested myself, What do I do? What do I do?” Silveti recalled when speaking to Tercer Milenio.
He stated he confided within the president’s chief of employees, José Gómez Huerta, who knotted his caterpillar eyebrows, and informed him:
“You do it. Be very cautious and maintain me apprised of what you might be doing. Go forward.”
Scott and the CIA had already been exploring different plans to steal the spacecraft. On November 19, six miles up the Panuco River from the Gulf of Mexico, two American spies watched the Soviet ship carrying the Luna arrive on the Port of Tampico.
The primary was Robert Zambernardi, an Italian-American CIA officer from Massachusetts. With tan pores and skin and a droopy black mustache, he might go for an area throughout covert operations, and was an skilled in pictures, secret writing, disguise, and womanizing. Zambernardi additionally managed a crew of mercenaries he referred to as Rudos—“powerful guys”—from Mexico’s corrupt and violent Federal Judicial Police. They made treasonous People “disappear,” in line with Mexican journalist and TV persona Jaime Maussan, who interviewed Zambernardi for a 2017 e book concerning the mission, Operación LightFire.
The second man was Warren L. Dean, Winston Scott’s deputy chief of station. A tall and dashing martini man, Dean had joined the FBI and chased Nazis in Bolivia and Chile, earlier than serving below Scott in London after which becoming a member of him in Mexico Metropolis. Dean watched staff load the cargo from the Soviet boat onto a prepare, and requested his colleague if they might by some means seize it throughout its journey to the auditorium.
“We will delay it just a few hours,” stated Zambernardi, however he dissuaded Dean from staging a Mexican nice prepare theft, in line with Operación Lightfire. “Transferring pictures are all the time very blurry,” Zambernardi informed him. “We’d like the prepare to cease.”
The freight vehicles had been slowly loaded with objects from Russian life—all the pieces from hammer and sickle postage stamps, to fur coats, and devices that displayed the would possibly of Soviet science: cutting-edge microscopes that exposed the invisible, and world-beating telescopes that scanned the good past. Below the unflinching stares of armed KGB brokers, staff lifted the Luna onto the prepare.
“There are too many free ends right here,” Dean conceded, in line with Maussan’s account. “We’ll do the kidnapping with Silveti.”
The American and the Mexican made an odd pairing. Dean stood half a foot taller than Silveti, and, whereas his Mexican counterpart was one thing of a celebration animal, the American loved teaching his son’s little league crew and doted on Completely satisfied, his household’s miniature dachshund, who was closely pregnant.
But they wanted to work collectively to make sure the Soviets wouldn’t discover a lacking spacecraft.
So Silveti gathered a crew of trusted DFS brokers and his secretary, Estela, to plan the heist. They plotted a crude distraction on the Soviet’s lodge. Silveti proposed filling the rooms with enticing Mexican and American women, instructed to befriend the KGB brokers. On the closing evening of the exhibition, the ladies would lure the Soviet troopers to a farewell social gathering on the lodge bar, whereas Silveti would hijack the truck carrying the Luna again to the prepare station.
On show
On November 21, 1959, the Soviet exhibition opened to nice fanfare. 1000’s of Mexicans flocked to the Nationwide Auditorium, the place they discovered the doorway guarded by large Soviet highway diggers and farm equipment. Inside, vacationers loomed over scale fashions of nuclear energy crops, particle accelerators, and the Lenin, the world’s first nuclear-powered icebreaker ship. Staff buffed the chrome bumpers of teal-colored Moskvitch cars, and Mexican youngsters poked out their tongues at Soviet tv cameras. However one exhibit really captivated the crowds.
For weeks, hordes of Mexicans gawked on the big rocket, listening on headphones to a badly translated recording concerning the “the boundless artistic skills of Socialism.” By the third and last week of the exhibition, multiple million folks had filtered by way of the auditorium, the place armed Soviet guards warned spectators to not stand too near their spacecraft.
“We didn’t know precisely what gas they had been utilizing. We didn’t even know the kind of rocket. It wasn’t a lot the spacecraft itself, it was the rocket the CIA was excited about.”
Jonathan McDowell, Harvard-Smithsonian Middle for Astrophysics
In the meantime, Silveti pored over road maps, studied routes, and scoped out places the place he would possibly spirit away the Luna and steal its secrets and techniques. Even the smallest diploma of success might ship very important data, explains Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and satellite tv for pc skilled on the Harvard-Smithsonian Middle for Astrophysics. On the time, the Soviet Union carefully guarded its rocketry and the People couldn’t work out why their know-how was proving a lot extra profitable. “We didn’t know precisely what gas they had been utilizing. We didn’t even know the kind of rocket,” he says. “It wasn’t a lot the spacecraft itself, it was the rocket the CIA was excited about.”
For good motive: The Luna related to the identical sort of rocket that powered the Soviet missiles pointed on the US. Dwayne Day, an American area historian, agrees that the People had been extra involved with nationwide protection than the race to the moon. The Luna contained “information that they might use to know the Soviet rocket that launched it,” he says.
The person in control of defending the Luna, Silveti recalled, was Boris Kolomyakov, the Second Secretary on the Soviet Embassy in Mexico Metropolis. Kolomyakov, a balding World Conflict II veteran, was a former rating officer of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police that ran Stalin’s brutal labor camps, and now an agent of the KGB. If Kolomyakov caught Silveti red-handed, he feared he could be imprisoned, or worse. “We had been all going to die,” Silveti stated throughout an interview with Telemundo, that aired on KNBC in Los Angeles in 2005.
As they plotted the heist, Zambernardi tried to calculate how a lot time he wanted with the Luna.
“I did some assessments,” he informed Dean, in line with Operación Lightfire. “We’d like a really highly effective flash to have the ability to seize the main points at midnight. The issue is that the flash takes too lengthy to cost. I managed to adapt the flash to 12V batteries. The digital camera can shoot each 30 seconds.”
To get what the CIA wanted, they’d want entry to the spacecraft in a single day.
Ultimately, they settled on a plan. Silveti and his crew of spies would want to hijack the truck carrying the spacecraft on the night it left the exhibition. They might re-route it to a lumber yard owned by his brother-in-law, the place CIA engineers would arrive at nighttime to dismantle and examine it. They must by some means return it to the Soviets by seven o’clock the following morning. Dean would rigorously monitor Silveti, and Zambernardi would ship the stolen secrets and techniques to the US.
With simply 24 hours earlier than the heist, Zambernardi opened the day’s second pack of Marlboro reds and watched the arrivals door at Mexico Metropolis’s worldwide airport. “My obligation was to regulate 5 engineers who had been despatched from the US to do the precise penetration of the rocket,” he recalled within the Tercer Milenio program. The CIA had despatched 4 engineers on faux holidays to Acapulco, a five-hour drive away. A fifth, he stated, had already arrived in Mexico from “Employees D.”
In keeping with Bayard Stockton, a former CIA officer and Newsweek bureau chief in Bonn and London, Employees D was a squad of burglars and protected breakers identified affectionately as “Second Story Males” for his or her means to interrupt into buildings through the second flooring. These males with ties to the underworld had been headquartered in a US Military compound in Virginia, Stockton wrote in his e book Flawed Patriot, and solely deployed outdoors of the US. Zambernardi’s Employees D man, he stated, was “a mechanical engineer who was an skilled in dismantling valves and what have you ever.”
Zambernardi made 4 journeys to the airport, every in a distinct rental automobile. He delivered the engineers to totally different accommodations, giving them data on a need-to-know foundation. They knew solely to be able to snap pictures and steal samples of “delicate tools.” His solely different instruction was to keep away from enchiladas and margaritas and devour solely oatmeal and water. “You’ll be working in an especially lowered area,” he stated, and a nasty case of fuel might smash the operation. “Don’t go away the lodge, don’t speak to anybody, and all the pieces might be wonderful,” he added.
The heist begins
The mission began one night in late December 1959, simply after the exhibition closed. In keeping with a authorities report, the Soviets believed the present was “an important success,” and had been celebrating constructive evaluations within the Mexican press. Havana, Cuba, was the following cease, however as quickly because the Soviets crated the Luna and lifted her onto the truck, it was time for the primary distraction.
In keeping with Silveti’s e book, the Soviet guards poured out of the auditorium bar at 4 o’clock, and had been livid to find that the Luna had not departed on time. The driving force, who was in on the operation, claimed there was a mechanical downside. The Soviets fiddled with the spark plugs, the generator, and the voltage regulator, however nothing might begin the engine—Silveti’s males had filed down the distributor rotor.
It was 5 o’clock by the point a brand new rotor arrived and the truck roared to life. The delay labored completely. The Luna rolled straight right into a rush-hour site visitors jam, tailed by a truck filled with Soviet troopers. Dean and Silveti adopted behind.
The Luna got here to a halt at a railway crossing, the place Silveti’s males had created a development downside on the observe. A refrain of automobile horns drew commuters from their vehicles to protest, because the Soviets determined to peel away. “Thank God the Russians stopped following the truck,” Silveti stated on Telemundo. Within the confusion, a Mexican agent changed the truck driver, who was spirited away. In the meantime, Soviet guards on the prepare station had been lured from their positions to affix the leaving social gathering at their lodge.
It was 5.30 p.m., and the Luna spacecraft had been efficiently kidnapped. Now they’d 13 and a half hours to take it away, dismantle it, steal some vital items, {photograph} and doc the remainder, then reassemble the entire thing and return the spacecraft, all earlier than the solar got here up.
The driving force steered the truck to a lumber yard on the junction of Camarones and Norte 73 streets within the northwest of Mexico Metropolis. Silveti had paid his brother-in-law to ship his staff on trip and broke a gap in an exterior wall giant sufficient for a truck to go by way of. CIA station autos idled outdoors, their drivers learning their mirrors for brokers of the KGB.
In the meantime, the farewell social gathering was underway on the lodge. In keeping with Silveti, the Soviet troopers “let free with the American prostitutes, and with the drinks.” Zambernardi’s son Paul informed me that his father purchased LSD to “put a Mickey on all of them.” With each shot of tequila, ideas of transport manifests and cargo evaporated.
At 7.30 p.m., the CIA’s engineers arrived on the lumber yard and grabbed their nail pullers, wrenches, and screwdrivers. Zambernardi instructed them to begin work. “They needed to research the hydraulics. They needed to research the valves. They needed to research {the electrical} techniques,” he recalled.
Among the many crew was a quiet CIA officer named Sydney Wesley Finer. The company had recruited Finer throughout his senior yr at Yale: he was now 29. “He studied Russian linguistics, and he was fluent in Russian,” his daughter, Debbie Remillard, informed me. “He was a really, very, very clever man … however in immediately’s phrases, he would seem like a geek,” she stated, describing his thick, black-rimmed glasses.
Because the solar set, Finer and his colleagues crowbarred off the crate’s roof, pulling out five-inch spikes. It was scorching work. “This was after we had been in management. I left the engineers in place,” Zambernardi recalled. “I instantly went again to the [US] Embassy to watch the Soviet Embassy.”
As two CIA males stood atop the crate prying up the planks, streetlights immediately illuminated the scene. The brokers feared the KGB had arrived, and froze to the spot holding their instruments. “We had just a few anxious moments till we realized this was not an ambush however the regular lamp-lighting scheduled for this hour,” Finer later wrote in a declassified paper within the CIA journal Research in Intelligence.
Eradicating their footwear to forestall leaving boot prints, the engineers climbed in by way of the truck’s roof of their stocking ft, carrying a drop mild and photographic tools. The boys draped a tarp over the roof to forestall the digital camera flash lighting up the sky. The area was so tight it turned clear why Zambernardi had ensured they ate solely oatmeal.
“The payload orb was held in a central basket, with its fundamental antenna probe prolonged greater than midway to the tip of the cone,” Finer recalled. For hours the boys quietly snapped pictures. “They crammed one roll of movie with close-ups of markings on it and despatched this out through one of many patrolling vehicles for processing, to make certain that the digital camera was working correctly.” The automobile raced again to a darkroom hidden within the US Embassy.
As Friday evening was Saturday morning, Zambernardi checked the negatives. They had been good.
In the meantime, Finer and the opposite half of the crew labored on the tail part, making an attempt to interrupt into the engine compartment. After a protracted hour of turning wrenches and eradicating 130 square-headed bolts, the crew arrange a rope sling to maneuver the heavy metallic cap apart.
Every part that was detachable from the craft was eliminated. Components of motors, inside parts, scraping from the rocket fins, liquids they thought might need been leftover gas… something and all the pieces that was of any consequence was stripped and brought.
The engine had been eliminated, “however its mounting brackets, in addition to the gas and oxidizer tanks, had been nonetheless in place,” recalled Finer. That was after they hit an issue. The one option to see contained in the equipment was to take away a four-way electrical outlet, however it was encased behind a plastic seal bearing a Soviet stamp. The crew wanted to depart the spacecraft precisely as they discovered it. But when the Soviets observed a lacking seal, the sport could be up. Might they make a substitute in the course of the evening?
The engineers pried off the seal and handed it by way of the window of a ready automobile, which screeched away at prime pace. In the meantime, “the pair within the nostril part photographed or hand-copied all markings within the basket space whereas we did these within the engine compartment,” Finer wrote.
By three o’clock the People had gutted the Soviet spacecraft. “Every part that was detachable from the craft was eliminated,” Silveti informed the Austin-American Statesman newspaper in 1987. “Components of motors, inside parts, scraping from the rocket fins, liquids they thought might need been leftover gas, something and all the pieces that was of any consequence was stripped and brought.”
“My technicians had been working all that evening,” Zambernardi recalled. “That evening we developed 280 pictures. We additionally had 60 samples of valves. We had samples of the fluid, rocketry fluid, or what have you ever.”
As they put the meeting again collectively, the CIA automobile returned: inside was an ideal counterfeit Soviet seal. They may now reseal the panel and conceal their theft.
Then simply earlier than four a.m., the yard was plunged into darkness. Within the males’s imaginations, armed KGB brokers had been fanning in to steal again what was theirs. A number of tense moments later, the lights got here on once more. There have been no KGB brokers, and no machine weapons. It was only a typical Mexico Metropolis blackout, Silveti reassured them.
In two hours, the Soviets would wake with sore heads and begin to rely their crates on the prepare station. Finer double-checked the spacecraft for discarded matches, pencils, or scraps of paper: one tiny hint of their mission would let the Russians know they’d been compromised and spark a world incident. With the scene clear, they bolted the bottom cap again into place. In a darkened Mexican facet road the People had peered into the guts of the Soviet arsenal. Zambernardi recalled: “It was all in my palms.”
Now it was time to flee.
However reversing a truck carrying a trailer requires ability, coaching, and area that the brokers didn’t have within the cramped lumber yard. In desperation, they needed to break their manner out. It took almost an hour for the boys to smash a bigger gap within the yard’s wall, however by 5 a.m., the truck was again on the road. It arrived in entrance of the prepare station because the solar rose above the empty streets. The unique driver was positioned again within the truck, the place he took a nap.
“Roughly 5 minutes to 6, the operation was terminated,” recalled Zambernardi.
At seven o’clock, the gates rattled open. Soviet troopers barraged the motive force with questions. He fed them the story he’d been coached to offer: he’d arrived shortly after the station closed—simply after the troopers decamped to their lodge to have fun—and spent the evening dutifully ready with the cargo. From their automobile, Silveti and Dean watched because the Soviets waved the truck into the station, unchecked.
Again within the US embassy, Zambernardi listened to the wires and confirmed that the Soviets knew nothing concerning the hijack. He stuffed the stolen elements and pictures inside a diplomatic pouch and handed it to a driver, who raced to a small airfield. There, in line with Zambernardi, US ambassador Robert Hill carried the loot onto a non-public jet headed for Texas. Silveti stated he telephoned Winston Scott with the excellent news.
In the meantime, throughout city, Dean returned to his household. They had been frightened when he didn’t come residence that evening, which was uncommon. In a single day his canine, Completely satisfied, had given beginning to a litter of six puppies: Dean and his youngsters fussed over the tiny creatures, and lovingly named each.
Shortly afterward, in line with Silveti, he and Dean visited Gómez Huerta, the Mexican basic who had blessed the mission. They introduced him with an in depth report of the operation, a scale mannequin of the Luna, and a few memento pictures.
Later, when he was safely again in Washington, the CIA’s Wesley Finer typed up a report on the evening’s occasions. “There was no indication that the Soviets ever found that the Lunik was borrowed for the evening,” he wrote. For many years, Finer’s household had no thought he had ever visited Mexico, not to mention been pivotal in an operation there to steal what the Russians referred to as an “computerized interplanetary station.”
Documented proof
In October 2019, the CIA responded to a Freedom of Info Act request for extra proof concerning the “Kidnapping of the Lunik,” and declassified a number of paperwork that uncovered extra particulars concerning the mission. Nevertheless, throughout a phone dialog, the company refused to substantiate the mission passed off in Mexico—citing the safety of “sources and strategies.” One CIA historian informed me they like to explain the heist as a “borrowing.”
The paperwork contained some element concerning the secrets and techniques gleaned from the mission: “Covertly, we had been in a position to purchase detailed information concerning the upper-stage rocket car … the Lunik stage which mates on to the Soviet ICBM.” After discovering the weights of the propellant tanks and payload, the US might reverse-engineer the car’s efficiency functionality.
Precisely what area probe sat within the lumber yard that evening remains to be unclear. Silveti assumed he had stolen Luna 3, the precise spacecraft that photographed the far facet of the moon. However that’s bodily unimaginable: the craft was not constructed to resist reentry. In keeping with Gunter Krebs, a spaceflight historian and physicist, on the time of the heist, Luna Three was doubtless spinning across the Earth at a distance of 310,000 miles, being steadily drawn into the Earth’s ambiance. In keeping with Jonathan McDowell, the Harvard astrophysicist, what they’d most certainly stolen was one of many Luna 2 craft which had not been a part of a profitable launch.
The stolen data got here at simply the suitable time. Simply months after the Luna caper, the US efficiently orbited a CORONA spy satellite tv for pc 17 occasions across the Earth. “Lastly, after many, many failures, they received it working,” McDowell says. “It was a really, very large advance … and it fully reworked the arms race.” On August 19, 1960, one other CORONA satellite tv for pc despatched a capsule again to Earth, the place a US Air Drive airplane grabbed it in a mid-flight maneuver referred to as an air snatch.
Contained in the probe was a 20-pound reel of Kodak movie capturing 1.65 million sq. miles of Soviet territory, together with photos of Soviet air bases. The CORONA photos had been low decision, McDowell says, so having accessed the Luna helped the CIA know precisely what rockets they had been trying down at. “Since you had really seen the rattling factor and held it in your palms,” he says.
“The Air Drive stated ‘we want tens of hundreds of missiles.’ And the CIA got here alongside and went, ‘We’ve counted the Russians’ missiles and it’s not as dangerous as we thought.’”
“We’re used to considering of the CIA because the dangerous guys, proper?” stated McDowell. “However, you understand, the Air Drive was like, ‘Oh, we want tens of hundreds of missiles.’ And the CIA got here alongside and went, ‘We’ve counted the Russians’ missiles and it’s not as dangerous as we thought.’” Realizing that the Soviets had far much less rocket energy than the CIA imagined took the sting off American paranoia. College youngsters not hid below their desks, because the duck-and-cover program was slowly stepped down.
The Chilly Conflict rumbled on for many years, typically taking America to the brink of nuclear warfare. However the US shortly took the lead within the race to the moon. On Could 5, 1961, NASA launched its Freedom 7 spacecraft, sending the primary American astronaut into area, Alan Shepard. Winston Scott’s adopted son, Michael, informed me he had all the time been puzzled by a signed {photograph} of Shepard he present in his father’s papers.
As for Luna 3, the precise probe that photographed the far facet of the moon, its whereabouts are “not fairly clear,” Krebs, the area historian, wrote in an electronic mail to me. Someday earlier than 1962, he added, it could have reentered Earth’s ambiance and melted into an infinite fireball.
In December 1962, Dean left Mexico Metropolis to develop into the CIA’s Chief of Station in Ecuador. He arrived in Quito on a airplane together with his canine, Completely satisfied, and certainly one of her puppies, Honey. Over time, the CIA’s work in Mexico slowed. In a evaluation of the company’s operations within the nation just a few years after the Luna mission, John Whitten, the brand new chief of the CIA’s Mexico desk, complained: “The brokers are paid an excessive amount of and their actions will not be adequately monitored.”
Sooner or later the Soviets did uncover what had occurred to their valuable rocket. Maybe they noticed the counterfeit seal, or opened the engine to search out all their valves lacking. Or perhaps there was a double agent working for the DFS, and even the CIA.
In 1964, the presidency of Mexico handed from López Mateos to Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who labeled Silveti a traitor for promoting out to the CIA, in line with the Austin American-Statesman. The spy fled Mexico together with his secretary, Estela. In keeping with Silveti’s e book, they’d fallen in love after his spouse handed away, and moved to Texas, not removed from NASA’s area middle in Houston.
Winston Scott died in 1971, having acquired one of many company’s highest honors, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. Michael Scott informed me that his father conquered Mexico primarily utilizing his Southern appeal. “It wasn’t like he was bilingual or that he had really frolicked down there … [he] dropped into Mexico Metropolis fully chilly. It’s exceptional.” Zambernardi, in the meantime, loved a protracted profession within the CIA. “He was very, very concerned within the Chilean coup,” his son Paul informed me, including that his father knew the infamous drug trafficker Barry Seal. He additionally claimed that Zambernardi took pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald getting into the Cuban embassy in Mexico Metropolis earlier than the assassination of JFK.
Mexico dissolved the DFS in 1985, following accusations involving drug trafficking, torture, and a multimillion-dollar US-Mexico automobile theft ring. Two years later, Silveti revealed his e book, as a result of he wished “the folks of the US and Mexico [to] notice the increase the American area program received from this hijacking.” By their nature spies are unreliable sources, however Silveti’s account was apparently confirmed by Albert Wheelon, the CIA’s former deputy director for science and know-how. In 2005, Wheelon spoke to Telemundo, saying of the Mexican spy: “He will get my thanks.” When the footage was proven to Silveti, his eyes stuffed with tears.
However not everybody was glad together with his retelling: When Warren Dean noticed Silveti on tv, he was upset, his son informed me. Dean felt Silveti overstated his function. “He was one of many employed palms the station employed from Mexico,” Dean Jr. informed me. “It was their job to basically get the truck into the palms of the station. And that’s all they did.” Dean’s father died in 2007, having acquired the CIA’s Profession Intelligence medal. Zambernardi died in 2010.
To my shock, I found that Silveti, now 91, was dwelling quietly in northern California. I spoke with him by cellphone twice, in October 2019 and December 2020, asking him to confirm features of his life and exploits from over 60 years in the past. Estela picked up the road after I referred to as. She informed me they’d simply received again from the pharmacy: Silveti was unwell.
Talking in Spanish, Silveti refused to speak concerning the mission, and disavowed his personal e book, Secuestro, over points together with his ghostwriter, however reiterated the declare that he saved the US. Silveti appeared to thrill in fooling the Soviets. “They had been caught so unaware, that after they lastly found what occurred, they didn’t even know which nation to protest to,” he boasted in his interview with the Austin American-Statesman. (The Russian and Mexican governments didn’t reply to requests for remark.) In the long run, he thought the Soviets ultimately found he was concerned.
“On the finish of ‘63, as I used to be strolling within the airport, we ran into Boris Kolomyakov,” he informed Tercer Milenio. “And he informed me: ‘You son of a this-and-that. I don’t lose the hopes of seeing you hanging in the principle plaza in Moscow.’”
Silveti stated he gave an ironic salute and grinned in response: “Thanks, sir!”
