On the Friday after Thanksgiving 1962 Cuban agents planned to detonate 500 kilos of TNT inside Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s and Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal. Che Guevara was the head of Cuba’s “Foreign Liberation Department” at the time.
On September 11th 2001, roughly 50,000 people worked at the World Trade Center. Macy’s alone gets roughly 50,000 shoppers on Black Friday. Castro and Che planned their Manhattan holocaust short weeks after Nikita Khrushchev foiled their plans for an even bigger one. “Say hello to my little friends!” Castro had dreamed of yelling at us in October of 1962, right before he imagined the mushroom clouds blooming. But for the prudence of the Butcher of Budapest, Castro and Che might have pulled it off.
“What?!” Khrushchev gasped upon reading Castro’s telegram on Oct. 28 1962. “Is he proposing that we start a nuclear war? That we launch missiles from Cuba? But that is insane! Remove them (our missiles) as soon as possible! Before its too late!” instructed the Soviet premier.
So much for the Camelot fable of JFK “standing up to the Russians,” during the Missile Crisis Khrushchev “blinked” alright. But at Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s genocidal lust–not at JFK’s flaccid threats.
“I’m proud of the path of Osama bin Laden,” gushed Ilich Ramírez Sánchez from a French prison in 2002. Ramirez was also known during the 1970’s as “Carlos the Jackal,” and “The World’s Most Wanted Terrorist.” In 1967 Ramirez-Sanchez was an eager recruit into Cuba’s “guerrilla” (terror) training camps started by Che Guevara in 1959. “Bin Laden has followed a trail I myself blazed,” he continued during an interview with the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat. “I followed news of the September 11 attacks on the United States non-stop from the beginning. I can’t describe that wonderful feeling of relief!”
“We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ very home,” raved Carlos the Jackal’s idol and spiritual mentor (Che Guevara) in his Message to the Tri-Continental Conference in 1966, “to his places of work and recreation. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him! These hyenas are fit only for extermination. We must keep our hatred (against the U.S.) alive and fan it to paroxysm!”
Fortunately, on Nov. 17, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI foiled the “war” Castro and Che had planned for us “hyenas,” in some of our favorite “places of recreation.” On Saturday morning, November 17th, 1962, FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. took on “all the trappings of a military command post,” according to historian William Breuer.
As well it might have. The night before the intelligence puzzle finally fell together. The crime the Left’s premier poster-boys planned against U.S. civilians staggered the FBI men. And these had served at their posts during WWII and the height of the Cold War. They’d seen plenty. Now they had mere days to foil a crime against their nation to rival Hideki Tojo’s.
A little perspective: For their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all 10 of them, that killed and maimed almost 2,000 people, al-Qaida used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT. Castro and Che’s agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year’s biggest shopping day. Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children–actually, given the date and targets, probably mostly women and children–were to be incinerated and entombed on orders of the men variously bear-hugged by Charles Rangel, hailed as an “old friend” by Jimmy Carter,warmly smooched on the cheek by Diane Sawyer, and honored with posters in Obama campaign offices.
Back in 1962 the FBI relied heavily on “HUMINT” (Human Intelligence.) So they’d expertly penetrated the Black Friday plot, knew the plotters and had them tapped. One by one the ringleaders were ambushed and arrested. Had those detonators gone off, 9/11 might be remembered as the SECOND deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Jose Gomez-Abad and Elsa Montero were among the arrested ringleaders.
“Elsa Montero and Jose Gomez Abad championed this project,” gushes New York Times contributor and Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Julia Sweig in the acknowledgements to her book, Inside the Cuban Revolution. “ In Cuba many people spent long hours with me, helped open doors I could not have pushed through myself, and offered friendship and warmth to myself during research trips to the island” continues the paean by the CFR’s and the MSM’s favorite Cuba “Expert” to her dear friends and professional collaborators, Elsa Montero and (the recently deceased) Jose Gomez Abad.
Imagine the howls from the MSM if, say, a Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow thanked Timothy Mc Veigh in the acknowledgements to his book! But thanking Castroite spies and terrorists seems perfectly proper.
Elsa Montero and Jose Gomez Abad belonged to the Castro-Cuban Mission to the U.N., and plead “diplomatic immunity.” Other plotters belonged to the New York Chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an outfit that became much better known a year later on that very week, when member Lee Harvey Oswald really racked up some headlines.
And while we’re on the subject, the ranks of The Fair Play for Cuba Committee also included CBS reporter Robert Taber, (current) Huffington Post columnist Saul Landau, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Jean Paul Sartre and Alan Sagner, appointed chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by President Bill Clinton in 1996.