Oral History Transcript - Max Winkler - November 17, 1988
Interview with Max Winkler
Interviewer: Stephany Goodbread
Transcriber: Stephany Goodbread
Date of Interview: November 17, 1988
Location: Mr. Winkler’s Home, New Braunfels, TX
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Begin Tape 1, Side 1
Stephany Goodbread: This is Stephany Goodbread. Today is November 17, 1988, and I’m conducting an oral interview with Max Winkler, former mayor of New Braunfels, Texas, and three-term city councilman. During the 1960s, Mr. Winkler worked for the United States Central Intelligence Agency [CIA].
Max, why don’t you tell us how you got started with the CIA, I think most of us are interested—
Max Winkler: Sure, a lot of people, I think, are interested in how a person gets involved in this. In 1947, we had an outbreak of Hoof and Mouth Disease in Mexico, the disease is fatal to cloven-hoof animals. Those are animals that have the split hoof, such as goats, pigs, and cows—and accordingly, we had in previous years had a small outbreak of the Foot and Mouth Disease in California. It was necessary to slaughter, to kill, five thousand cattle in one county in order to eradicate this disease. They were buried in a fourteen-foot ditch, and fortunately the quarantine was successful, and the disease was eradicated. We knew this was very serious, that this disease had occurred in Mexico, it was brought into Mexico by a Zebu bull that was transported into the southern part of Veracruz from Brazil—and the United States thought certainly that since it was so far from the border, and since Mexico is sort of funnel shape southward, to the small end of the funnel, it would be easier to go down there to the spot where we had the disease and eradicate there rather than wait until it got to a three thousand mile-border, from Brownwood [Brownsville] clear up to San Diego—and accordingly, I was selected to go down on that program. I had worked on a ranch, rather a very large ranch in Texas and was somewhat fluent in Spanish, and I went down to Mexico on this assignment as a personal officer—the—it was very difficult trying to eradicate the disease because the people were illiterate, and there were no fences, and the cattle crossed territory where there were outbreaks, and there was heavy jungle and also desert areas and just every type of hazard that you could imagine—in addition to the opposition that the people had to the program. Many—practically every farm family and many city families depended on the livelihood for the children from the goat milk or from cow’s milk, and here the Americans were coming down the eradicate this disease, and we were—we had a coworker, a Mexico worker with us and every activity that we participated in. The disease got completely out of hand before—in less than six months, it just spread like wildfire, and the first thing we knew, it had come through Yucatan, come into Veracruz, spread out into the center of Mexico, and we found evidence of it as far as Saltillo and Monterrey. As a consequence, we made a quarantine line at Monterrey and Saltillo over toward the border at Mazatlan—the Pacific border on the west in the area of Mazatlan and on the east at Tampico—and we endeavored to have all vehicles sprayed that came through any road beyond this point entering in the vicinity of the United States. In order to travel by air, you were required to walk through vats with certain chemicals that would prevent the infestation of this disease. And likewise your cars were sprayed—railroad traffic was impaired by this procedure in seeing that the disease was not transported beyond that area. During this time, we knew that they had had outbreaks in Europe, and we consulted and researched our situation with the—some of the veterinarians from Switzerland, and [they] were able to develop, after a period of time, a vaccine that was effective for a six-month period, we had a thousand Americans down there, mainly cowboys because—cowboys from the border because they had worked on horseback. They had to be fluent in Spanish, and we worked also with Mexican veterinarians, with an American veterinarian as a coworker, and it imposed a tremendous demand on the United States colleges, there are only seven colleges in the United States that produce qualified veterinarians and graduate students, and as a consequence we were scrambling to get veterinarians—and we didn’t care about their Spanish because we had interpreters that could work with them.
Well, in working on this program—we were involved with a number of transactions with the State Department, and we were included with the diplomatic group, and we were invited to their receptions, parties, and so forth that they had—by coincidence, I was fluent in German, and when I went to some of these parties during the la[t]ter part of the program in 1951 and ‘52 and ‘53, there were certain—there were a pair of Russians that invariably—were friendly to me, and they came over to speak to me in German because they did not know English—and they would have been a little bit ostracized in the group that was in attendance at the party because not many of the State Department officials were fluent in German and certainly none were fluent in Russian. Well, this relationship was not anything close at all, it was just—probably on a once every two month basis that I would see these fellows.
However, during all this time, we were working on Foot and Mouth Disease, and we finally had it under control and had been able to push out quarantine line from Saltillo and Monterrey clear on down beyond Mexico City southward, and at the very tip of Veracruz we still had outbreaks of this disease, despite the fact that the cattle in that area were confined to a certain area and were quarantined. No cattle were permitted to go beyond the fence line of certain ranches in that area, and most of the cattle in that area had already been killed. We were curious that we continued to have outbreaks because we thought our control was 100% effective. And as a consequence, I fled down to Minatitlan and then drove over to Coatzacoalcos, which are two towns in the very southern tip of Veracruz, and from there we went in—on the Minatitlan River, I believe is the name of it—a river as wide as the Mississippi, we went—we had a guide with a kayuka, which was simply a hollowed-out log, like a canoe. And he took us up the river in the direction of these ranches that we were interested in where we were having outbreaks. I had long ago learned that whenever you travel in the jungle area and there were monkeys and all types of multi-colored birds, and it was a beautiful situation—and in a situation of that sort—whenever you pass anybody coming along the river going in the opposite direction or in the same direction, you visit with them and have an exchange, a conversation and share some drinks with them if you have anything to drink and a meal or something of that sort. However, after we had gone—we had a three-day journey that we were going to make up that river, to the location, to our destination, but by coincidence on the second day out, we saw in the distance a kayuka was coming down the river and they—changed their course on a wide river, they changed their course to go to the opposite bank from where we were, and they attempted to hide it more or less—or seclude their kayuka over there—in the jungle. We put the binoculars on these individuals, and I identified them as the two Russians that I met at these diplomatic parties—functions that I had attended. Well, we waved to them, and we didn’t get any reactions at all from them, so we continued up the river another day, and we got to a ranch owned by a prominent Mexican, and a rather large ranch, and we served him generously some tequila, and we stayed up late into the night after we met him, and he talked rather freely, and he did admit that these two Russians had been there to visit with him, that they had left him a suitcase full of pesos, and that for that courtesy he was releasing his cattle beyond the quarantine area—his cattle were infected and were spreading the infection again in an area that we felt was devoid of any disease. Well, we didn’t spend any long period of time with this individual, the next morning we left early, and we came down the river as rapidly as we could, but it still took us two-and-a-half-day trip, and we flew back to Mexico City, and I gave the report to the assistant secretary of agriculture, who was the director of our program in Mexico, Dr. Noise. He heard a part of my story, and he said, “Wait a minute,” and he got on the phone and he called the president, President Alemán of Mexico over to the conference room and also the secretary of agriculture who was—Lazaro Lopez, I believe, I’m not positive, but anyway, the most prominent officials in Mexico, the two most prominent individuals concerned with this disease, as well as the American chief of our program, were interested in the conversation that I imparted to them, and as a consequence, the president ordered these two Russian diplomats out of the country in twenty-four hours’ time.
By this incident that the next day that I had a teletype inviting me to Washington, and I thought it was rather unusual that anything like that should happen, and I did go—I flew up to Washington immediately, as they requested, I met with the Bureau of Animal Industry, and also the secretary of agriculture was there, and I was told that the Central Intelligence Agency was very grateful for certain actions that transpired in getting these Russians kicked out of the country, and they wanted me to come on board—I was really flattered by this invitation because in 19—this was ‘53, at that time, [the] Central Intelligence Agency was a young agency, and it was made up mainly of—students from the Ivy League—Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, and so forth, but I was very anxious, having been in Mexico for seven years, I was anxious that our children, who were about seven and twelve and fourteen, or something like that—they had seven years of education in Mexico, the boys had, the youngest one was just entering school down there, and I wanted them to get back to the United States and learn something of the United States culture and the United States educational system. Incidentally, the boys were in the—a junior high and high school situation while they were down there, and Pete Hendricks was the athletic coach, who is now the retired superintendent of schools here.
Goodbread: Here in New Braunfels.
Winkler: Yes, we didn’t—I didn’t have any close relationship with Pete, but I did remember his name and renewed that acquaintance when he came to New Braunfels later on, twenty years after that.
Goodbread: Small world.
Winkler: Well, I had an opportunity to remain in Washington for about a three-year period— my children naturally were involved in the public school-type of education that we had in the United States and we were very pleased with that opportunity—our seven-year-old daughter was put in the second grade, and one day after attending school for about a week, she came home, and she said, “Daddy, what is miercoles?” and she said, “You know, it’s a day of the week, miercoles,” and I said, “That’s Wednesday,” but that caused me to realize that she was thinking in Spanish, she spoke only Spanish and was going to have a tough struggle with the English language. We requested that she be returned to the first grade, and the principal had never heard of anything like that, usually they think their kids are all whiz kids and that they should go forward. But our request was finally granted, and it was fortunate she did get a good background in the English language and moved forward rapidly.
Goodbread: Oh yeah, Marlena is remarkable.
Winkler: After a three-year period, Mrs. Winkler had also gone to work with CIA and—the two boys had summer employment with CIA, the summer school—the summer vacation period was a lucrative source of employment, temporary employment for high school students who did simple filing and simple clerical assignments. They were the—all together the daughters and sons of people who were employed by CIA, so it didn’t require any unusual investigation or clearance for them to come on board. I went through the—when I came on board, just like everybody else, I went through an intensive six-months investigation, and then I had a polygraph interview before coming on board.
Anyway, after a three-year period, things were—there were disturbances in Central America, and we were supporting Batista in his opposition to Castro. Castro had made an effort to come in a few years—a—oh, I guess in about—in the middle fifties, somewhere along there, and he thought he could come in and take over the country of Cuba with fourteen men and a shrimp boat that he had. They landed on the coast, and I think on the southern coast somewhere, but they were immediately captured and Castro was put in exile, and the others too were captured, and they weren’t executed; they were simply sent to the prison Isla de Los Pinos, which is the federal penitentiary and is a very secure type of a penitentiary on the southwestern tip of Cuba. Castro was probably released because his family was quite wealthy and very influential, and there were certain commitments that caused the Batista administration to be sympathetic toward Castro and his family, and they thought too that Castro was just a—oh, a little—college student that was a little bit out of line and maybe too much to the left or something, but anyway he was released, and he did leave the country and organized—again, a group of Cubans that were opposed to the torture tactics and police tactics and police tactics of the Batista government, and in about 1953 or ‘4 or somewhere along there—there were a number of people that were coming out of Cuba, in exile, because they were losing their wealth and they were losing the democracy that they—the form of democracy they had experienced, and they wanted to—they, through their determination to overthrow Batista, were interested in going back and fighting. Castro landed somewhere west and north of Guantanamo on the eastern side of Cuba, and he started coming through the mountains going westward, and he gathered a lot of strength from the farmers and the people in small municipalities because all of them had possibly had relatives that had suffered the intense torture and the police system that was invoked on them.
With all those things happening, the United States withdrew the support that they had for Batista, and within a short period of time, several months, they were sympathetic toward Castro, and Castro was in an eastern area; even in the eastern area of Cuba where battalions of soldiers would be sent out by Batista to confront Castro and these troops, and before they had a confrontation, the Batista troops would defect and would join Castro in an effort to overthrow the government. As a consequence, this momentum continued to move rapidly, and it was slow probably by our measurements, but it was rapid when you consider that Castro had a limited amount of personnel to start with, the nucleus of them were officers that he had brought in with him, but he was simply fighting with farmers that had—they’d fought with machetes all the time, and slowly the arms and money and supplies were brought to Castro, and it was made a little bit easier for him to move in towards Havana, and I guess it was in ’59, I don’t recall, but he was close enough to Havana that it was very eminent that he was going to overthrow the government.
A John—a Vincent St. John, a photographer for Life magazine was invited—had gotten an invitation—or had been granted an interview with Castro, and it was the desire of CIA to have him go in with an interpreter or somebody, and I was selected as an interpreter under a cover situation which—wherein I carried the name of Max Has—Charles Hasenski and—
Goodbread: Charles Hasenski?
Winkler: (Laughs) And this name was simply taken out of a Chicago telephone book, and my papers and all arrived a couple of days before I ever had to fly from Guatemala up to Mexico City, and there I met John, Vincent St. John, and we flew over to Havana and were met in Havana at the airport by a couple of military personnel, they looked like they were privates, and they had a jeep and simply escorted us out of—beyond the airport and on the road going eastward, and we traveled on a very ordinary road, it wasn’t highway at all, but it wasn’t bad road, and after probably a four- or five-hour stretch, it was dark, and we were blindfolded, and we came to the first checkpoint, and we were moved onto burros, and we were transported—we transported some of the photographic equipment on burros, and we both had an opportunity to ride a burro then we were in the edge of the mountains by that time, and we—it was forested, and not dense forest I don’t think, and we came to another check point where it was mentioned that it was satisfactory to have these people—these two civilians—aliens go on up into the mountain, and by midnight we were deep into the mountain, and when we arrived at the encampment of Castro and—we were—our blindfolds were removed, and we were a little bit surprised that there were only two large military tents, the type of tents that accommodate fourteen officers, that is cots and accommodations of that sort, and that was a staff tent, and the other one was also being used as a staff headquarters and also a mess hall, if it was ever—if the weather was bad. Castro simply had a pup tent, and we were all advised that he had asthma attacks that were very severe, and in his pup tent he did have an oxygen mask and an oxygen tank, and Che Guevara, of course, was his advisor, and I was designated to talk with Che Guevara because Castro was fluent in English, so St. John interviewed Castro and I spent a couple of hours with Che Guevara, then we—together with Castro, and the four of us were simply talking until about 4:00 in the morning, and then we started our trek back to Havana. Che Guevara was probably as sick a man as a person could be with asthma, he also probably had—
Goodbread: Was it Che that had asthma?
Winkler: Both.
Goodbread: Both of them had asthma.
Winkler: Both of them had asthma very bad, and our reports—our medical reports from CIA indicated this much, and they didn’t think they would be alive at the time that they arrived in Havana, they thought it was that severe.
Goodbread: Little did they know.
Winkler: Yes, however these were the only two of about twenty-some officers that were on the hill there, in the encampment, and there no privates or non-commissioned officers around and no civilians or anything else did we see. Every—there were two women there, one was Maria, she was Che’s girl—common-law wife, and I believe that Che’s—common-law wife was Elissia [Aleida?], I don’t know their other name but all of the—just about all of the men in the encampment had beards, and they all had leather jackets, they were all of robust, tall stature, quite different from what I’d anticipated, but he had picked out some strong officers and intelligent individuals, although none of them spoke with us and all of them were speaking Spanish around us as if they didn’t care whether I heard them or not, and I didn’t take any notes at all, and St. John took photographs, but then he had agreed with Castro that he would not release any of the photos to Time—for publication by LIFE magazine until such time that they had finished their mission of capturing Havana and overthrowing the government, and I don’t remember any other incidents except that when we were on the hill—that were unusual, except both Guevara, as well as Castro, revealed to each of us, Castro to St. John and Guevara to me, that they were going to establish this democracy, and they pointed out a few officers in the group up there— “Now, this individual will be Secretary of Health, he’s a prominent,” —he was a former physician in Havana, and such-and-such an individual was going to be the director of the treasury, and he too had a financial banking experience, and there was another newspaper man who was designated in one of the departments, and in education they had designated a prominent educator that was up there on the hill fighting with Castro to overthrow the government, and they—every indication implied that they were going to have a democratic form of government—we were impressed by what we saw and rode on back down the hill and returned to Havana by the same route, and we both flew to Mexico, and that was the last I ever heard of St. John, and I went back to my mission in Guatemala.
Castro went in on the end of Havana, just within a matter of a month or two after that, and when he got within the outskirts of the city, he sent a messenger in to advise Batista that he could have a bloodless revolution if he left within twenty-four hours or if he wanted to put up any kind of opposition, he said, “My strength is x number of thousands of troops, and we’ll overthrow the government.” Batista recognized that his police force and his military force had disintegrated, and he yielded to Castro, and within twenty-four hours he had packed suitcases just stacked with money that he hadn’t already shipped out, he had sent a lot of money over to Portugal and Spain, but he stripped them of all the wealth that was there in the way of money and members of his family and members of his—whatever you call a cabinet, left within a twenty-four-hour period, and they flew to Portugal and Spain and went into exile in either of those two countries for an extended period.
Castro marched in under a glorious reception, and thousands and thousands of people were happy to see that they were going to have a democracy. Castro was a—he reacted in a manner of many glorified heroes that he wanted to go up to the—he wanted to come up to the United States, he wanted to come to New York to appear before the United Nations and—he had already strongly committed to a democracy down there, and he did appear before the United Nations, and the United Nations and the United States picked up the tab for his—for he and his entourage to come into New York, they had the top floor of a hotel on Times Square there, and there was seventy-five individuals in the entourage, there were thirty-five women, and they were very common, ordinary, many of them prostitutes, and some of the officers who accompanied him were very crude, illiterate almost, they weren’t at all the caliber of the individuals you would’ve expected. They did no—they didn’t use the bathroom, they used the bedrooms, and they were not satisfied with the food that they were buying in restaurants, and they bought chickens and sneaked them up through the freight elevator—
Goodbread: Live chickens?
Winkler: Live chickens and they gutted them in the bathtub—in their hotel room, and with some hot plates they attempted to fix some of their favorite—their dishes, I guess paella or arroz con pollo, or whatever it is, chicken and rice and fish, they didn’t have any fish, but they did fix chicken and rice, and in a matter of two or three days, the maids had complained so much about the clean-up and the manner in which the hotel was being destroyed and so forth, and Castro and his entire group were just thrown out of the hotel. Che Guevara was very pleased over this because Castro was negotiating for a $5 million loan from the United States, just for a period of thirty to sixty days to let them get their government on their feet down in Cuba, and Che said, “Well, let them kick us out, I can get more than that from Russia.” Che incidentally admitted that he had been over to Moscow for training, and he admitted to me that he felt that he was one of the most competent guerilla fighters that there was, and he showed me a textbook in Russian that he had—I don’t read Russian, but I recognized that it was printed in Russian alphabet—however, they had documents there, in the pup tent where Che Guevara was, that indicated the progress that they were documenting in regard to a democracy that they were going to form when they took over the government, Batista’s government, which never—democracy never happened. They were evacuated from the hotel or kicked out, whatever it may be, and the Russians immediately offered them—some entirely satisfactory accommodations with no limitations on their conduct or behavior, and—
Goodbread: In New York?
Winkler: Yes, in New York City, and they left and went back to Cuba with a Russian loan that was double the amount they were trying to negotiate with the United States, and at that point—the Cuban—the influence that Che Guevara had on Castro was so great that they simply defected against any concept to democracy and were going to be entirely a communist country.
Goodbread: Well, was Castro at this point, do you think when you saw him on the mountain, he was leaning in a communist direction—
Winkler: No, but he was—
Goodbread: Or was he just that easily influenced by—
Winkler: He was influenced that easily by Che Guevara, he was—he was tremendously influenced—and Che was a very intelligent individual and very—and he knew, he had given so much advice to Castro relative to the military strategy that had made their entire maneuver strategically successful, so he relied an awful lot on Che Guevara, and Che was appointed as Secretary of State or executive advisor to the president, if he wanted to call himself President, but it was more like a dictator, and the director of defense was Raul Castro, the brother to Fidel, and things started going downhill rapidly, they had already deteriorated considerably, and there was so much hope on the part of the people that were encouraged by Castro coming in. But with the change in the money, those that had wealth had nothing because the new money was printed and the old money was worthless, and the wealthy people were required to share with others, and they lost their belongings, they lost their plantations and farms and properties, everything that they had accumulated in a long time, which was possible under Batista. Castro, having been so successful in the takeover, it was a very severe jolt to the United States government officials because we had all the commitments that he would operate under a democratic formula, and he was going to have an election within a period of six months, and these people that we had introduced to us as a potential cabinet member[s]—
Goodbread: Yes, up on the mountain?
Winkler: Yes, they were all now put aside, and these people, many of his officers who were designated to accept these posts, defected and came to the United States. They weren’t able to escape out of Cuba on a passenger ship, they confiscated shrimp boats, and they confiscated just every type of transportation; airplanes were, in some instances were stolen from the runways, and pilots flew to the United States, many of them were landing there at the naval base in Key West, and there is a natural Atlantic current that flows northward from the eastern side of Cuba, right toward the Florida Keys. So a number of people were, not a number but some that were just desperate to get out of the country, left in rowboats, possibly sixteen, eighteen, or twenty or twenty-four foot boats.
Goodbread: Like our friends [who left from Cuba in a rowboat].
Winkler: And they got out after, say, four or five hours of paddling—they got into that Atlantic current or Gulf—it was an Atlantic current that brought them into the Florida Keys. Literally thousands of them ran out of water and food, and the hot sun caused them to simply become dehydrated, and they died, and their infants died, and it was just miserable the number of people who lost their lives, but they were that desperate to leave. When they were coming into the Florida Keys in exile, the FBI agreed to cooperate with the CIA in attempting to organize some type of a strike force that would probably attempt to overthrow—that sometime attempt to overthrow Castro, and these individuals were directed, even by the Miami newspapers, to report to certain safe sites that were designated by the FBI, and in every instance we were interested in men reporting to these safe sites, and at a time that they had accumulated, say, twenty-five to thirty-five individuals that were willing to fight back at Castro in an effort to overthrow him. They were taken in these vans, like a U-Haul van, without any panels, without any windows or anything like that, they were taken to Fort Myers at night, always in the dark of the moon, and there they were put into a boat, and in some instances a shrimp boat or a yacht that would accommodate twenty-five to fifty people, and in a zigzag course we would take them out to Useppa Island. Useppa Island belonged to the Hilton Hotel people, and they had a beautiful resort on that island. It was about seven miles long and two miles wide and had about a dozen individual cottages and had accommodations in the hotel for, say, fifty or one hundred or more people.
Goodbread: These are Cuban nationals? Taking—
Winkler: Yes. So we were attempting to assemble a strike force, and through this manner we were able to get twenty-five, fifty and a hundred and more, and more men, exiles over on Useppa Island, and we immediately began negotiating with some of the countries in Central America for a place to put these fellas for training because it would have been very embarrassing for the United States to train them anywhere in the United States, and we didn’t want it to be known even that we were, we didn’t want it to be known that we were involved in this operation, and we didn’t want the men to be [known] that were, the exiles, to know where they were, and by going out to Useppa Island at night, they’d—many of them were completely, lost and none of them knew what island they were on, they figured they were on the Caribbean, and they saw Mexican airplanes fly over, and they identified Pan American and a few other planes and figured they were in the Gulf of Mexico, but they didn’t know where they were. But we negotiated with President Ydígoras of Guatemala, and he had a coffee plantation on the western side of Guatemala, and he agreed to make that place available for a training spot, and it was simply a rare plantation where the coffee was wild coffee, it hadn’t been—it wasn’t a domestic sort of plantation where everything was orderly planted or anything of that sort, it was just jungle with a lot of coffee trees, and coffee beans were harvested by Indians that lived in that general area, and it was sparsely settled by Indians that were not—the Indians were very, very far apart, they probably lived five miles or more from one to another little cabin in the jungle where they were. After—as we accumulated these individuals, we gave them medical examinations, and we also gave them literacy tests, and we did take, we tried to take those that had at least a fourth grade education and could read and write, and we were interested in what their parents’ background might be and where their parents were, and we gave them polygraph tests to be sure they were telling us the truth, we thought we were sure of that, and accordingly we had, we had a flight from Pensacola where we took these people at night on a boat and from Pensacola we flew them by plane to Retalhuleu on the east bank of Guatemala.
Goodbread: Let’s flip the tape.
Winkler: Okay.
End Side 1, begin Side 2
Goodbread: Okay, we’re on the second side, let’s start again. So, we’re in Guatemala.
Winkler: Yes, from a—we flew them down initially in a small Cessna with just a half-dozen Cubans, and we went down to see whether or not we could land on the shore, what kind of a strip we had and where we would build the encampment—following our arrival and with six exiles, we went twenty miles up on the—into the plantation, which was on the side of an extinct volcano and heavy jungle, and we decided that it would be a good location where we would not have too many successful defections or wouldn’t have any penetrations from the enemy or anything of that sort, and following a favorable report on the location of this within a week we started sending down C54’s with a hundred troops and also equipment, some with tents, some with generators and stoves and portable toilets and everything else that you would have for water purification and for sanitary living and things of that nature. Among the personnel we accumulated, we had several that were—had experience—restaurant experience, and they were designated as cooks, and we had good meals prepared by these individuals, and the Cubans themselves wanted to prepare their own meal on Sunday, and invariably it was paella, rice and chicken and fish, and things of that sort. Supplies were sent to us by plane from Guatemala City, and we had very good Cuban menus. More and more men came in, the first thing we knew we had three hundred, then five hundred, then a thousand, and we again gave them a polygraph when the—after we got down the military routines and after we issued uniforms to the fellows and gave them guns and hand grenades and got into the more realistic training that you would have in battle. There [were] only two American advisors, and when it came to certain type of training, we requested that the Pentagon send us a half a dozen Rangers or a half a dozen pilots or half a dozen navigators, and the Arkansas National Guard sent down fifteen planes that landed at Retalhuleu, and they established a base down there and could land on the beach, and they were training planes, and they—among our group, we had some fifty Cubans that had had training at Fort Bragg or elsewhere, and they had learned to parachute or had some elementary training in parachuting—so we got specialists to give them training in this aspect, and within a matter of months, we had the Cubans flying the planes, and we had—they could fly within a matter of approximately four to six hours; they could make a roundtrip over Havana, drop their bombs or whatever they were dropping, and come back and land without any incident—
Goodbread: They weren’t actually bombing at this point, were they?
Winkler: No, they were doing reconnaissance for a—flights—
Goodbread: —just pretend bombing—photographs?
Winkler: Yes, photographing and probably getting experience with the planes and things of that nature. We didn’t have any fatal crashes or anything of that sort. In the first week, after we had twenty-five troops down there, one of—we were—we’d taken out on a five o’clock jogging session, and we were on a cliff-side, an escarpment that was right along a deep ravine and a river down below. One of the trainees was pushed off of that cliff, and it was, it was rumored, strongly rumored that he was going to penetrate this group and get the word back to Castro that he was being trained by Americans or by some—or a group of Cubans were being trained for invasion of Cuba at a later date. We never made an effort to locate his body because of the dense jungle, and it would have been almost impossible to locate him in a place like that because within a matter or one or two nights his body would have been devoured by wild animals because they were—it was that heavy a jungle. In the night, you could hear the screams of the panthers and the monkeys and the wild life in the jungles, it was there. We numbered—we started a numbering system of our trainees, starting with the number 1000, and that gave the impression that if [they] ever were captured or if numbers ever got out that number 1007 was captured, and they’d presume that we must have more than a thousand trainees—we had Cubans that were medical—that had medical training, and they served as nurses with a group like this, and in every way things progressed for a matter of a year, very effectively, and [the] Pentagon came down with a staff to inspect the troops, and they said they had the firepower of an American soldier, they were very impressed by the training the fellows had had, and we were ready to—the invasion was scheduled just before November—
Goodbread: Now was Kennedy President at this time?
Winkler: No, Eisenhower was President.
Goodbread: Eisenhower!
Winkler: And he was accepting the military strategy 100% because the Pentagon was calling the shots, and everything seemed to just move along real well; however, they felt that because of the political situation it wouldn’t be appropriate to have the invasion at election time, so the invasion was postponed. And we’d already issued the arms, rifles, .45’s, hand grenades, and everything to the troops in anticipation of the invasion, and boy, the morale just dropped right to the bottom. First night after we announced [the cancellation], there were fourteen of the fellows that went over the hill, and they went to the Eastern coast of Guatemala, and they stole a shrimp boat, and they tried to land right by the Isles of Pines where the penitentiary was, and that was the worst mistake in the world. They were captured and immediately there was strong suspicion that they were trained—being trained by Americans and that these were some of the guys that had gone over the hill. We strung up a number of magnesium bombs that would explode with trip wires, and we put them within a one kilometer circumference around our encampment so if anybody would try to sneak at night and hit one of those wires, the entire thing would just light up like a giant stroke of lightening, and we had only one that tried to escape the following week, and after he saw what happened, the others recognized how effective this was in exposing them; none tried to escape. The jungle was one factor that they were discouraged too because they have no snakes at all in Cuba, and there were snakes in this area, and they were afraid of the wild animals and the noises that you heard in the jungle.
Goodbread: Did the fourteen—did you ever hear anything more about the fourteen, or did they blow your cover or—
Winkler: They—we’re sure that they did, we didn’t hear anything more about them, and they were not released with any of our prisoners after the invasion failed, so we don’t know what happened to them, I imagine that they were executed. But, we devised a system of censoring the letters that they sent out because they could sent mail to Miami, and their friends in Miami could send it from there on to somewhere in Havana or in some parts of Cuba, or they could—they had relatives in Havana, in Miami that they could write to but we censored—in censoring the mail, we learned that one of the individuals had mentioned that two received an unusual shipment of furniture, fourteen tables and fifty-four chairs and desks and a few other things, and we related that to the inventory of stuff that we’d just gotten in on a C54 from homestead base where all stuff was shipped from the United States, first to homestead and then in a plane that was blacked out, it came down to Guatemala—and these were actually pieces of ordinance, they were either machine guns or M1 rifles or hand grenades or bazookas or whatever it might be, and we intercepted a second letter that this individual sent to Miami, and we found out who it was—who was the recipient of the letter in Miami and was sending on to the address in Florida—in Havana, so we had know[n] —
Goodbread: So he was writing in code—a very simplistic code.
Winkler: Oh, yes—we had no facilities for imprisonment of this—of an individual because we’d already given them the polygraph test, and we thought we had—we rejected quite few who flunked the polygraph test, but this individual had passed it without any marginal comments whatsoever, but he had defected, and he was a traitor, and the first night or two after he was captured, a group of the trainees dug a fourteen-foot hole, and this guy was put down in the hole with just some guard at the top of the hole, we should have just locked him in the cabin there or something, tied him, we did handcuff him and put him down there, and that wasn’t satisfactory so we got half a dozen Marines from—they were sent down from the Pentagon and found a deserted coffee cabin out in the jungle, and we put this guy at that location, his name was Pedro Hernandez, and the six Marines were on two-hour shifts or four-hour shifts, and we were very anxious that this individual not escape because he had been to Russia, to Moscow, and had—when he came onboard as a trainee, he had a Russian passport, but he gave some excuse for having it, and we didn’t question him anymore, we should have or somebody should have recognized this, but despite the fact that we had him isolated in the jungle with this kind of guard, he asked for an aspirin early at six o’clock one morning, and the guard was no further than twenty-five feet from the area—from the kitchen pantry where they had the medicine of that nature, and in the meantime this individual was—had been as common every night routine and daytime routine, he was in leg shackles and also in handcuffs, and he was handcuffed with one—to the bedpost and also with a leg shackle to the bedpost down there, so during the night he had picked the lock somehow on the leg shackle as well as on the handcuff and unsnapped them, and while this fellow was turning his back to get the aspirin, he escaped.
Goodbread: Into the jungle?
Winkler: Into the jungle. The Green Beret, there were six Green Berets, they were embarrassed by this incident, they were—they immediately got word out to—what do we do? Well, we immediately alerted all the coffee plantation people that we could, the coffee bean pickers, they were looking for this guy, and even the Green Berets tried to run him down and got in sight of him, in the jungle, and he was still dragging—he had gotten one of the leg shackles loose from the bed but he was still dragging a shackle, and he still had a handcuff around his wrist, and he was running away from the Green Berets and running away from everybody else, and once in a while the Indians would scream that “lota nameous” or something, “we have him;” sure enough, they didn’t have him, and we lost him. We found—oh, six or eight hours later we found the little trail where he had changed clothes and stolen a bicycle from a guy and taken the guy’s clothing, and that—from that bicycle trail he went down the road about ten kilometers, and he got a bus, and I guess he got money from that other guy that he’d stole the bicycle from, and he went Tapachula, to the Mexican border, and from Tapachula he went to Mexico City and reported to the Russian Embassy, and they held him under political asylum there, and they sent him over to Moscow, and he received additional training and came back later on as a—again as an agent for the Cuban government or for the KGB. I’ve got the handcuffs and the shackles right here that we had that guy—
Goodbread: He’s a wily fellow, isn’t he—
Winkler: Hold on a minute. [Mr. Winkler goes and gets the handcuffs and shackles] This guy Hernandez did come back to haunt us, and we were able to put him under close surveillance, and we trailed his activities in several Central American countries and also down into a—Chile and Argentina, and he was quite an active agent, but we never—we marked closely—followed the activities of our trainees, and we found there was a group of dissidents numbering fourteen that were under the leadership of—a fellow by the name of Alvarado. It’s immaterial what his name was, but there were fourteen that simply did not want to accept the military training, they didn’t—they were anxious to get back to Cuba and thought they could overthrow Castro, or they wanted to—really, we were afraid they would simply expose our activities and blow the cover or the whole program. We thought of a way to better handle these guys than we did the Hernandez case, we ordered a hydroplane, and we rounded up these fourteen guys, and we put them on a hydroplane, and we had found an island called Sayaxché, and it was on a wide river in the upper part of the very north eastern tip of Guatemala, and I believe it might have even been in the British Honduras area, but we thought it was Guatemala. Anyway, Sayaxché was an island that was designated to be a location for these fourteen guys. It was an island that was about five hundred yards long and about two hundred yards wide, and it was entirely jungle. The river on each side of the island was a mile wide, and we unloaded these guys with leg shackles and handcuffs, and we had a couple of guards with us, and we knew these guys were pretty well-stripped, and we stripped them further when we got off the plane, we took all their boots off, took them back on the plane, put the boots back on the plane, so they were barefoot and they realized that they couldn’t do anything violent, so we took the leg shackles back with us and the handcuffs, and we left provisions there for a week’s time, and they, they were rather complacent and accepted all of this, we’d searched them, and we didn’t think that they had any possible way to communicate with any part of the world, and we ourselves had spent a couple of nights on that location to determine the feasibility of the imprisonment of these guys, and we thought it was perfect. At night, you could hear the tigers or the whatever was screaming over in the jungle, and we knew there was snakes, even on the island where we were there, there were snakes, and there were animals in the jungle that would certainly discourage any attempt to escape.
After a week’s time, we delivered—or in less than a week’s time, we delivered a load of meat from our bi-wing plane on a fly-over. We intentionally missed the island by a hundred yards, and the meat was dumped in the river, and man, the barracuda and shark and everything came up to eat that meat, and these guys just never even thought of taking a bath after that time. We didn’t service that island real well for a period of six months that they remained before the invasion, and we were able to drop a carton of eggs a hundred forty-four, twelve dozen eggs by parachute without breaking a single one. We were able to deliver just—a pretty good menu of stuff, naturally they wanted black beans and rice and chicken and stuff of that nature, but not a one made any effort to escape, but every single one was aware of the fact that the Bay of Pigs was a failure when it finally transpired. They were able to rig up the little radio—
Goodbread: A little wireless radio?
Winkler: A wireless radio without any batteries or anything and they were able to communicate feebly, in some manner with what was going on outside in the world. But it didn’t make any difference because they did not—they were not able to communicate, nobody knew that they were there, no fisherman ever bothered them or came on, and we—when we were there for a week, we went to—we ourselves went swimming, and while we were swimming, there were as many four women that came up, and they stripped and went swimming right along with us. It was just the Indian way of informally taking a bath, they thought nothing of it, and they were common-looking females, they’d worked like men all their lives, they looked like they could whip us, so we weren’t interested in them. But anyway, we—these were the only two serious problems we had with dissidents and traitors or anything of that sort, but as it became time for the invasion, the fellows simply were well-trained, they wanted a secret weapon, and CIA provided them with a secret weapon, and it was simply a fountain pen. It was a fountain pen that was a flamethrower, and you would just handle it like a fountain pen and when you pressed the little clip on there, it would throw a flame almost for fifty or sixty or seventy feet, I’m sure. All Cubans, whether they’re fighting for or against Castro, seemed to have beards, and these guys that were fighting for us knew that if they could scorch some of those beards, the guys would be frightened to death, and they were all proud to have that but they had some—they had—they, really by the evaluation of the Pentagon, they had the firepower of the American soldier. They didn’t have the spirit because most of these soldiers that I’ve observed in Central and South American and Mexico do not have, at that time, in the fifties and sixties, did not have the training that our soldiers had, they did not have the equipment, and even in Mexico and in every country in South American and Central America, if a soldier fired a shot he had to replace it with his own money. Ammunition was so scarce so there were not many killings or many shots fired, and their equipment was shabby, but their morale was horrible, and in an effort to boost morale with this Latin-type of a bunch of a 1,200 men that we had trained for the invasion, the last—the week before the invasion, we engaged twenty-five prostitutes in two busloads in Guatemala City, we transported them to Retalhuleu, we took them up the hill in a personnel carrier, and they had a terrible rain, and the road had washed out like it does every night because it’s simply volcanic dust and your torrential tropical rains are horrible down there, and they constantly had bulldozers on duty day and night trying to repair the road or bridges, and these prostitutes were supposed to be there for two nights but they serviced our men for the whole week before the invasion.
Goodbread: So you had happy little invaders.
Winkler: They were probably a bunch of satisfied guys, but that didn’t help the invasion at all. But in the training we had, fifty-four pilots down at Retalhuleu were involved in making these overflies and they now—a week before the invasion, they started blasting the runways of all the major cities in Cuba, and if they found an airplane or anything like that they took potshots at it, and they were very effective in that, and really, according to our intelligence, Castro had only fifteen MIG’s, and these—
Goodbread: Russian MIG’s?
Winkler: These—Russian MIG’s, but they were not expecting the airports to be bombed, and as a consequence, all but one MIG at the time of the invasion had been disabled and none of the air—we thought not a single of the airstrips in all of Cuba could provide for take-off because they were so heavily bombed. But—the invasion took place about the fifteenth of April, I guess, whenever it was. We went to Nicaragua, and we had an aircraft carrier there that transported them within twelve—twenty miles of the Bay of Pigs, and we had six Russians on that aircraft carrier, and we had six Russian pilots—six Hungarian pilots that had been captured and tortured by the Russians, and they wanted to do everything in their power to eliminate communism, and they were—their planes on that aircraft carrier had not a single serial number, there was no way any of those planes could have been identified as United States planes, and with the serial numbers obliterated, with their black paint jobs, there were ready to fight. And, in addition to that we had—we did run a number of operations where they were always involved when we were running into Cuba, and we would go into Cuba before the invasion, and even afterwards, trying to transport an agent or transport some medical supplies or ordinance or something of that sort, and invariably we’d notify the Coast Guard, the U.S. Coast Guard, that we were involved in this operation. Usually that took place at the dark of the moon, under the belly side of the alligator, Cuba is shaped like an alligator, the south “belly side” is the south side of it, and we’d make out penetration on that side because in the first place, they were, they had only a limited number of naval vessels and south side, and we became very disturbed that John Kennedy’s brother was independently running an operation and he had a shrimp boat that was—
Goodbread: We’re talking about Robert?
Winkler: Robert, the Attorney General—Robert Kennedy had a crew of about twenty-five men and a sophisticated shrimp boat that had all kinds of electronic gear on it, and we were running an operation at the Isle of Pines, just below the Isle of Pines, Robert Kennedy’s boat appeared at the identical moment, and they caused us to draw fire from the militia, the Cuban militia, and they were—on that occasion, we were trying to pick up Castro’s wife because she had already been separated legally from Castro, she had tried again and again to sneak away and get back—get to the United States, but she didn’t want to do it without her son, but on this occasion she was supposed to have her son with her, she didn’t, and we got there punctually at midnight and she was on the shore, she delivered documents to us, a suitcase full, she said she wouldn’t leave because her son was—actually, he was held back because they knew she wouldn’t leave the country without him, and Castro kept the son, and—she did leave just a suitcase full of documents that were very valuable to us in telling us something about missiles being stored in locations in Cuba, the strength of the military, and stuff of that sort, and Cuba has seven hundred caves in it and in every one of them that could possibly hold missiles had missiles in them, even though they had maintained, they had took all the missiles out of Cuba long ago. Well, there were a few other occasions when there was—when we were running operations that we were fired on through reckless planning or interference by Bob Kennedy and his group, but there wasn’t anything that could be done about it.
Goodbread: Well, did President Kennedy know about the Bay of Pigs?
Winkler: Oh yes, oh, he knew about it, but that’s another story—on the fourteenth of April, in ’59, a couple of days before the invasion—on the strategy of the invasion, and he said, “I want to withhold one hour of the invasion.” He said, “It looks good to me, it has the sanctions of the military strategist in the Pentagon, and it looks good to me, but I withhold the privilege as President.” And sure enough, on the fourteenth of April, Raul Castro came up to talk to the United Nations, and he said that at this very moment, in one of the Latin American countries, in Central American countries, the American advisors, and there were only two of us, are training our Cubans, our exiled Cubans to go back into Russia, into Cuba. And he said that if this happens, we’ll be ready for them because we have alerted our military, but at that United Nations meeting we had Ambassador Stevenson, and we also had Chester Bowles there, and as soon as Raul Castro spoke at five or six o’clock in the evening, these guys jumped on a plane, and they flew to Washington, and they wanted to talk to President Kennedy, and there was a reception in the White House, and they met with Kennedy, and they told him what was happening, and he took them up in the bedroom, and they, they attempted to contact Allen Dulles, but Allen Dulles, the director of CIA, was on the west coast and instead they got the executive who was Charles, I don’t recall his name, he was a very fast creamery operation in Dallas. Cadell, Cabell, General Cabell, who was the deputy director, they called him over to the White House at 10:30 at night and revealed what had, the same story that they had told Kennedy, and Kennedy said “We cannot afford to have the United States embarrassed by participating in this type of training and the air support will be, will be canceled.” And he thought that was the only way that our Americans could be identified as participating in this strike.
At that time, the strike force had already left Nicaragua, Cabeza de Cavella or some port there in Nicaragua, Horse’s Head is the name of the port I think, Cabeza de Cavella, and they were already steaming toward the area of the Bay of Pigs, within a matter of hours the strike was to— it actually took place, and the—there were no American advisors or no Americans, even mercenaries among those that were on the aircraft carrier that went in rubber rafts, rubber personnel rafts and what have you, whatever equipment that was carried into the Bay of Pigs and what they carried in there was very adequate, provided they had air cover because they a—the air cover was, would have provided support when they landed, it would have prevented that MIG from coming in there, and the operation would have just—we feel it would have been very successful. The few scouts that landed on the Bay of Pigs fanned out, and they talked with farmers, and the farmers welcomed them, and they said, “Give me a gun, give me a hand grenade, give me a .45, I want to go with you.” And it—the camaraderie among those Indians was tremendous, they were glad to know that there was going to be a democratic form of government and that Castro would be overthrown because they had had enough of communism, but we were not—we were in—my wife and I were both in Guatemala City at that time, and we listened to—we weren’t in communication, we listened to the conversation, but we were not giving any instructions, there were some individuals that were in Nicaragua from the Pentagon that were calling the strategies, the military strategy, and they were saying, Well, we’re going—we’re bringing on the convoy equipment now, and we’re bringing on a certain amount of ammunition, and now’s the time that you radio operators should be first on board—on the personal carriers and things of that nature.
But all of the personnel were transported, 1,200 to the beaches and at about 12:30, the Cubans came on the air, Pepe Lopez was our captain and commander, and Pepe said, and he talked English, and he said, “We’re now ready for the aircraft support, the air support,” and the Americans replied, “It will be forthcoming shortly.” And he got on the air fifteen minutes later, and then—but he didn’t get any favorable response within an hour, he said, “My god, you son of a bitches have, you Yankee son of a bitches have betrayed us again.” And he said in Spanish, he said it in English, he said it so everybody that could listen could know what he meant, and at that very moment in the White House that decision had been made, and General Campbell pleaded with President Kennedy not to cancel air support, he said it would be absolute murder for 1,200 men because we don’t stand a chance, and we’ll gain everything with air support, we don’t stand a chance without it. Well, he had come in his pajamas and a coat and suit pants over that, to talk to Kennedy because he knew how urgent it was, he went back home at two o’clock, he came back, and he, he got— he had an opportunity to again talk to Kennedy in the bedroom, and he, he pleaded with him to please allow the air support, but it was withdrawn and cancelled, and General Campbell said, “We’re getting reports that our men are now being murdered as they hit the beaches.” That—they knew that the tanks were on the way to the Bay of Pigs from Havana, and they knew that the MIG would take off at daybreak and would be in that area, and they would just pass over with a machine spray and that it would be an absolute failure, and it was an absolute failure, there was no way in the world that the guys had a chance whatsoever.
After that, I guess it was a—for some it was fortunate, for many it was a bitter disappointment—all of you recall that the CIA negotiated with a couple of major pharmaceutical companies to provide vaccines and medicines and so forth in the amount of $62 millions’ worth, which was a piddling amount to pay a ransom for the release of the prisoners, and it was expected that the—even all prisoners would be released by, anybody that has followed this situation has just learned that within the month of July of this year, 1988, Pepe Lopez was just now released from prison. He’s a beaten, discouraged individual. And he said there are probably two or three or as many as five that are still being held in the prison. He wasn’t tortured, particularly, but he just wasted his life away during all these years.
Goodbread: They took the pharmaceuticals and the money, but they didn’t give us back our men.
Winkler: That’s right, they gave us back—
Goodbread: They didn’t give us back the Cuban men.
Winkler: They gave us back 1,100 and some troops and they all—well, many of them—
Goodbread: But not the leaders, you got—
Winkler: They kept the leadership of this group, and the leadership was a very competent group, and as a consequence our program was focused more on what to do and how to do it. We wanted to immediately dispose of Castro because he had become popular, he had been successful in defeating an American-sponsored invasion, and as a consequence we felt—it was felt by the Pentagon that he had to be assassinated, and it appeared to be easy to get—there were volunteers after volunteers that wanted to go in and assassinate him. One—a couple of agents were in the—at the National Palace, they usually got fifty thousand people crowded in there, they brought them in in truckloads from all the countryside, and he was scheduled to always speak at eight o’clock, but he never got started until ten, and he talked to three or four o’clock in the morning and just ranted and raved, and there were a couple of guys that were trained and had access to a building, and they had high-powered rifles with scopes and infrared and everything else where you could assassinate a guy, and they were—they had bragged about what they were going to do, and they were captured and put up against a wall and killed. Invariably, when they captured, after that time, when Castro captured anyone he put them on television at eight or nine o’clock in the morning, and you could pick them up on television in Key West, you could identify the individual, and usually they’d say, “Yes, I have been trained by CIA,” no matter what you told them, they always admitted that they were with CIA, then at night you saw them blindfolded and put against the wall and handcuffed, and five soldiers were there to shoot them, and you heard the shots, but you never—and then you saw the crumpled bodies, and they were all blood-spattered right in there [mid-chest]. Another agent was sent in, the very first agent we sent in from—Guatemala was Carlos Blanco, and he made this thing from—when he was up in the encampment, this is a cypress—not a cypress; it’s some kind of heavy root. [Shows a wood carving]
Goodbread: Oh!
Winkler: [carved on root] “IN GOD WE TRUST,” he put on there, and he gave it to me, and he gave me all of his personal effects, and he went—
Goodbread: Was he a Cuban?
Winkler: He was a Cuban, and he was designated to be a captain of one of the companies that went in. We made several attempts to eliminate Castro shortly after he went into office, we attempted to train agents that would do the dirty work, and certainly the CIA and no branch of the military service would engage in anything of this sort. We had trained a couple of agents that were at the National Palace one time when Castro was going to make a speech, and they had a—
Goodbread: We talked about those.
Winkler: Oh, did we?
Goodbread: Yes, the two that got captured.
Winkler: We had his girlfriend that was going to Mexico City, too—going from Miami to Havana, and she had two poison capsules and was going to put them in his drink, and she put them in cold cream, and they dissolved in the cold cream jar. In other instances, we had planned to assassinate, we knew that on Thursday night Castro generally went out to one of the embassies right on the outskirts of Havana. As he came out of the revolving doors of the National Palace, two men appeared in the revolving doors, and they were six feet and bearded and leather jackets and smelly-looking, and two agents opened fire on them, they killed them both. And then another one came out and they killed him, but all three of them were bodyguards. His bodyguards were just exactly as he was, they were similarly dressed, they were bearded, and these agents were captured, and they were put on the television, and they were shot that—put on television that morning and shot that night. And still another instance, when we knew that Castro was going out to visit an embassy on a certain night, we had, we knew he went out there in a Volkswagen and that one of the U-turns in the road he had slow [to] up a little bit, and there was an agent that was right there, and he had a machine gun, and it was in a wooded area, and he was simply instructed to kill the passengers, and that’s what he tried to do, and that Volkswagen came by and he just filled it full of lead, but Castro was in a second Volkswagen, and this guy was captured, and he, too, was killed.
So some of these efforts were of no avail. There were a lot of measures that were taken to make it appear that Russia was not doing a good job in helping Cuba. We wanted to get propaganda out, we had on Qual Island, which is in the center of the Caribbean toward South America, south of Cuba, we had then a television and a radio station that piped propaganda into Cuba, but it was somewhat effective. We had a little boy that would a—all the cars in Cuba that were operating effectively said, “We were made in Russia” or “Russia provided this vehicle.” We had them put a teaspoon of sugar in the gas tank and that would cause the cars to stall.
End of Tape 1, begin Tape 2
Winkler: I mentioned to you earlier that Bob Kennedy had caused abortion of some of our operations because he independently was operating a really sophisticated shrimp boat with a lot of electronic equipment on it, in and around Cuba, and we had contact, too, with some activities of President Kennedy because he was trying to indirectly have the Mafia participate in the assassination of Castro. The a—many of you learned very recently that Marcello was the leader of the Mafia in New Orleans and some other prominent areas and certainly controls a lot of the activities in the Caribbean. Marcello did come down to Guatemala—oh, after Castro had, probably a year or two after Castro had taken over, and when he flew into Guatemala at midnight, we reported to President Ydígoras that he was there and told him the nature of his assignment. We were not going to negotiate for the assassination but in some manner and through certain contacts, with certain agents and the Mafia, Marcello was going to arrange for the assassination. Ydígoras, although he had always been extremely cooperative and very friendly toward CIA and had been just very generous in many of his activities—he was furious over this type of activity, and he ordered Marcello out of the country by daybreak. So after a one o’clock steak and potatoes dinner, Marcello shared that with one of the type of girls the CIA has on hand, and she was available until five o’clock in the morning when a couple of the Guatemala soldiers who were guards reported at the door and escorted Marcello to the airport. That was the only contact that I had directly at all with any activity that Washington was involved in after the invasion. We learned—
Goodbread: Washington, meaning Kennedy, Mafia-tie-ins?
Winkler: Yes, in Washington, I mean. We learned a lot of things indirectly that were transpiring in between CIA and the Pentagon or the plans for the invasion that was ordered when General Campbell pleaded for air support and it didn’t materialize. Later, just a lot of things that I don’t recall the sequence in which they happened, but during the time, even when I referred to the exiles coming out of Cuba—out of Cuba, it was necessary to provide some—some resources for these people and some protection and shelter, and in some instances I was on detail from Guatemala to the Florida Keys, and my wife, who I also mentioned worked for CIA, would be detailed for short periods of time to work in the Florida Keys—to receive those people who were going into exile, and as I mentioned earlier many of them became involved in boats that would sink before they ever got off the shore or far from the shore, they had, especially babies, I recall, were dehydrated because they didn’t provide adequate water for them to drink, and a ninety-mile trip from Havana to the Keys sometime lasted four days, and in the hot sunshine that was horrible. Sometimes they were fired on by Cuban patrol boats; sometimes they were lucky and would come ashore with parts of their wealth.
I recall in one instance a Catholic priest came in in a shrimp boat they had stolen, they had improvised with pipe an anchor, and the anchor was made of two inch steel pipe, but it was hallow and it was filled with jewelry and gold coins, and that’s how the people on that boat were able to simply escape with a very small portion of the wealth they had. And during the—at the time that they came onshore, they were immediately provided with shelter, a package of cigarettes, a basket of fruit, and their spirits were raised because they were so glad to get that kind of reception. They didn’t go begging; when they got on the Florida Keys they were provided jobs, they transported up to Miami, and they were taken in by the Cuban organizations for the exiles, and they were well-treated—a number, we had established a fine pipeline of intelligence from the fisherman that came out of Cuba and for a while in Key West, as well as over in Guatemala, we had those fisherman that would leave their port of Havana and come directly to the Florida Keys or to Guatemala, and they would give us information on ships that were in the harbor. They didn’t know how to read or write, but they would copy the names of the freighters and tankers that were coming into Havana, and we knew they were Russian, we knew by the hieroglyphics that they made that it was the Russian alphabet and the name of the ship. However, our intelligence from the British Isles told us at what time those tankers had come through the straits in Britain, and we knew in seven days they would appear in Havana, so our pipeline was very, very thorough, and when fishermen came in and told us something like that we would provide them two or three hundred pounds of fish, enough to just load their boat, and they’d go back into Cuba with a load of fish and talk about all the good fishing they had when actually the fish had been netted and bought from some of our fish markets. Their stories of bitter suffering were just horrible, many of these people related, and women were hysterical in many instances, and time and again bodies were found floating out in the Caribbean Ocean. It was an assignment that you felt proud to participate in because they were a deserving group of people, they were very patriotic, and they were, they had a cause that was just something that you had to praise.
Goodbread: Well, did Kennedy’s involvement in the a—our involvement in trying to repeatedly, unsuccessfully assassinate Castro though, do you feel that it’s true, according to this latest information that Castro probably had a hand in the assassination of Kennedy, or—
Winkler: I don’t know at all because—
Goodbread: You mean now knowing this, it makes sense—
Winkler: Well, it makes sense, and you can put together certain pieces of information, and you think, “Oh boy, this has got to be,” but in an intelligence organization you operate on the basis of need to know, and I was working in Guatemala, and I was working with agents that would give me information about what Castro was going to do and where he was doing it, things of that sort, and I didn’t need to know about what—who the president or what organization, reason they were, they had a lot of water dripping from them, and I don’t know whether they had to be cooled or what it was, but there was always a stream of water whenever these things came through the town, and they were particularly heavy, they recognized that. Well, after Khrushchev said, “We’re going to withdraw the missiles, these” — we never did see anybody that reported that they came out of the caves. We knew that they had taken those to the caves, but we never knew that they were withdrawn at all. But down on the docks you had pipes that were like these culverts that they put under ditches over here at the LCRA, those that were being loaded onto ships, and when they unloaded a missile, the missiles were that size, and it usually took a mechanized equipment or thirty or forty men handling special equipment to roll them off of onto the cargo carrier, onto the truck or whatever it was. But when they took missiles out, they were taking just these culvert-like things that ten men could handle.
Goodbread: So you’re saying you think the missiles were never removed.
Winkler: No, they weren’t removed.
Goodbread: And so they’re still there today.
Winkler: Well, by this time they would have deteriorated, I guess.
Goodbread: Don’t you figure there are new ones?
Winkler: Well, I don’t think they could bring in new ones.
Goodbread: You don’t think they could? Get by with it?
Winkler: I think that our intelligence would pick that up immediately because we have a lot of friends there, and we have a lot of U-2 flights of today, even today there have been two overflies, and at thirty thousand feet, that’s what you usually cruise at when you go from here to Dallas, at thirty thousand feet you could pick out the numbers on the parking lots, you know where it says “this slot is for number 21 and 22 and 23,” your photograph will be so plain that you could read the figures on the parking lots.
Goodbread: So you think that even though they didn’t remove them, they’re shot [worn out] or haven’t been replaced.
Winkler: I don’t know that much about deterioration of that type of ordinance, but I imagine that they—what they have in the way of missiles at that time would be pretty near obsolete and would not have been maintained well. And probably could have been replenished with some other type of ordinance that they could have sneaked in, although they may have enough Russian technicians there that they may supply the ingredients for refueling or refurbishing or—
Goodbread: So they’re still definitely a threat to our security, aren’t they?
Winkler: Yes.
Goodbread: They really are; we just choose to not give them much thought—
Winkler: We were in Guatemala City when that—when the missile crisis occurred, and we were on a standby with—in constant radio communication in our cars or whether we were walking anywhere, on—we couldn’t be away from communications for a ten minute-period, it was so very explosive that we thought something could happen any minute, and it was tense.
Goodbread: Yes, I can remember it.
Winkler: But, we, too, were in a country that was not sympathetic toward Yankees, although they didn’t think of me as a Yankee, they thought I was something else—we got a lot of—we did use those Hungarian pilots, we use them for trainees also in our training of—working with the trainees because we wanted them to realize how bad communism is, and they were people that had suffered by having their tongue slit or their fingernails pulled out or having their legs broken or having a rat cage put on their stomachs and strapped on their stomach and their hands handcuffed behind them and then tied down, and the rat would eat their guts—
Goodbread: Oh my god!
Winkler: And they still lived! But their torture was more atrocious than anything that you’ve heard of the Chinese or the oriental types of torture that we think are horrible.
Goodbread: And this is the Russians torturing Hungarians?
Winkler: Hungarians.
Goodbread: We had, my father had a good friend who was involved in the Hungarian Revolution and was [a] very strong patriot.
Winkler: If we’d had six more weeks, that revolution would never have gone that route. The Americans—the CIA was involved, we had students that were in very key positions to give us information, there were American troops that might have participated in this thing, American equipment would have been available, and it could have completely been avoided, but the Hungarians were impatient, they wanted to get on with it, they were so patriotic, they—
Goodbread: Yes, they are.
Winkler: They were very determined to resist the Russians, and they were just over manpowered.
Goodbread: Terrible.
Winkler: You got to hand it to the [Hungarians], then—
Goodbread: Aren’t they incredible?
Winkler: Very courageous and very determined group of people. Is that running [the machine]?
Goodbread: Oh yeah, it’s running.
Winkler: Oh golly, I don’t—
Goodbread: This is fascinating—how did you get out of the CIA? Let’s—I know you’re getting tired, it’s getting late—
Winkler: When the Bay of Pigs failed, there were a lot of things that needed to be done in Guatemala, trying to get the military equipment to—returned to the proper people and get some of the trainers—some of the American advisors that were in certain assignments outside of training military, get them back in the United States. We had to—we had a very—although I’ve mentioned we had tremendous cooperation from Ydígoras [President of Guatemala], he was well-compensated for his generosity—time and again, we’d have a flight of—with every flight of trainees that came in on a C54, we’d probably have one come in that was loaded with refrigerators, televisions, radios, just a lot of modern-type utility—
Goodbread: Luxuries for them.
Winkler: Yes, and he built two ranch houses while he was president, and they were as modern as any ranch house in the United States—elevators from the first floor to the second, escalators in the—
Goodbread: Escalators!
Winkler: Black marble on the walls in every bathroom, and he had his own liquor that was from a—it was bottled for President Ydígoras, and it was of a certain age, and it came from a prominent brewery in Europe. Scotch from Scotland, bottled specifically for President Ydígoras, and [he] played the banjo, and he was a marvelous entertainer, and he was humble as any individual you ever saw.
Goodbread: What happened to him?
Winkler: Uh, I lost track.
Goodbread: That’s been a fairly—Guatemala has been fairly stable, considering Nicaragua and El Salvador and the problems that they’ve had.
Winkler: They had a revolution there in 1954, probably or somewhere around there and then while we were training the troops, they had a house—they had an outbreak on [the] east coast in some little area out there, and I don’t recall even the name of the area where it was, but it was—we immediately had a C-54 ordered down, and we got it in just a matter of a couple of hours, and we loaded the Cuban trainees that we had at camp—we loaded some seventy or eighty into it, and they went down to the area where they were using just shotguns and .22’s and whatever kind of firearm they may have in an effort to overthrow Ydígoras, and the little coup-type activity was all over in just two days.
Goodbread: Put it down right off.
Winkler: Yes, it was eliminated that quickly. These guys were, the Cuban trainees that we had in the plane were—they weren’t the cream of the crop, but they were just the right twenty-four, thirty-four, fifty that we could get in there. And—
Goodbread: You didn’t have anything to do with or have any involvement at all in the Sandinista movement or anything—
Winkler: Not at all—there were students that—I’m sure there are students that were trained by CIA that participated in that because we found that—we found that all out disturbances indirectly can be handled with student trainees, and you can rest assured that CIA was very busy with certain recruiters at Seoul in the Olympics in Korea.
Goodbread: These recent Olympics?
Winkler: Yes, and in every one of the Olympics and in every international affair, if there is an indication that an individual, a prominent athlete might defect, he’s given all the influence and all the protection and every effort is made to have him escape, but they’re very well-chaperoned.
Goodbread: I wonder if the KGB does the same thing. Do they also—
Winkler: They do it, maybe more so for other countries, but I don’t—we haven’t had any American athletes because we permit our athletes to go where they want to go; we’ve got basketball players in Italy and Spain.
Goodbread: So freedom’s not—they have freedom, it’s not as enticing to—
Winkler: That, and, too, we have people, if they want to go, if they want to defect and move to Russia, well, let them go. They may change their mind when they get there, they’ve come back from there, but it’s a one-way street with a—so much so with the previous administrations Russia has had. There is an indication there may be a relaxing of that a little bit, but you can’t be too sure.
Goodbread: So with all the political unrest that was going on in the sixties, I guess the CIA was really involved in—things—
Winkler: Yes, but you know—I mentioned that you know from the most elementary start of your training that you’re working on the basis of “need to know,” if you’re working in Guatemala project, you’re working on the Guatemala project and if one of your buddies is going over to Korea, what’s he going to do in Korea? You don’t know—
Goodbread: And you don’t ask.
Winkler: And you know that Joe Blow has been working with you, and he goes to Korea as John Doe. And time and again, you think you’re going to keep up with these guys and exchange letters, and I don’t even know their real name. And I’ve met Charlie Duke, and Charlie Duke was on a plane with a guy that was going over behind the “curtain,” and Charlie was trying to distribute some Bibles back there, just a year ago. Now, Charlie said these guys worked with CIA, and he was on the project in Guatemala, and you didn’t know him? Well, I didn’t know him as the name of John Davis or something like that, his name may have been Charles Hasenki, like mine was, he wouldn’t have known Max Winkler either, and gosh, I don’t even remember any of Puddin’s names [nickname for Max’s first wife], but—
Goodbread: “Puddin’s” your nickname for Mamie?
Winkler: Yes, but what her nickname was, but whatever her alias/pseudonym was, but that’s the only way you know these individuals and several of the peoples—now [E. Howard] Hunt, who was involved in the Watergate was done, happened to be down in Guatemala, and he happened to be with me on the very day that guy was pushed over the cliff that we thought—
Goodbread: Howard Hunt?
Winkler: Yes, and he got a lot of details and took a few pictures, and he wrote a novel about this, and in some of these novels, especially these soft-type things, there may be some comment about (?) Martin, too, when we were on Useppa Island, those guys had never played touch football, and they played soccer real well, but the Cubans didn’t know how to play touch football or flag football, and we didn’t have any equipment, but we did get a football, and as a consequence we played, we didn’t play rough football, we played touch. It was mentioned about how—how the American advisor attempted to introduce some physical—like physical workouts that the Americans introduced, it was mentioned also that it was a failure as far as we were concerned, and I don’t know about asking for a soccer field on Useppa Island—
[Discussion between Goodbread and Winkler about soccer is messed up on tape at this point. Mr. Winkler talks about tennis courts, ten-hole golf course, and other receptions on the island, and he also talks about the dropping of supplies on the island at night.]
Goodbread: Well, how did you get out of the CIA? How many more years did you stay in?
Winkler: I didn’t stay in, let me see, the Bay of Pigs was in ’62, I guess, in ’61 or ’62, and in ’63, we tried to get President Ydígoras to take the equipment, the fifteen airplanes he wanted, but he wouldn’t sign any kind of written agreement that he’d accepted these because he wanted them for personal use or he wanted them available for revolutionary outbreaks that might happened during his regime. And he had a coffee plantation with warehouses that are a lot like these at Wurstfest over here, and he [had] a tremendous amount of storage space when there wasn’t coffee storage involved, and he usually got his coffee and shipped it out from somewhere in Retaliau, which is [in Guatemala].
End of Side 2, begin Side 3
—Since we had as many as a couple of thousand rifles, we had a couple of thousand .45’s, we had hand-grenades, bazookas, we had a half a dozen generators and a lot of logistics, supplies of that sort that we wouldn’t send into the Bay of Pigs because it wasn’t that sort that we wouldn’t send into the Bay of Pigs because it wasn’t essential, a lot of it was new that we had never used. Now, he wanted all of that, but he wouldn’t sign any agreement that he had received that from the United States government, so I stayed in Guatemala for six months because Washington CIA thought that I could get him to change his mind and that he would sign a takeover for all that equipment. We were glad to give it all to him if he’d only sign that he’d received it, but he was afraid that some of this cronies would recognize that he had all that stuff and that he might be preparing for a takeover of another country or trying to make a military state out of Guatemala or something that he would never do because he was a pretty—he had a lot of influence with the people, he was sympathetic toward the poor, he was certainly, had a concept that was a democratic type of government, and he was more honest than many people we dealt with, and he finally did break down and give us some kind of papers showing that these—some of this equipment was left to him personally, not to the state—not to the country of Guatemala. And there were other activities I was involved in, just in continuing to contact and work at night with certain agents in Central America, they were coming into Guatemala, and I was instructed to meet with them and get certain information from them or give them certain information, and I found out that Mamie was involved in working with some of the guys that I was working with, but I didn’t know it at the that time, and that’s how departmentalized it is on the “need to know,” I didn’t need to know, and she didn’t need to tell me, so I didn’t know until we were finally separated from the CIA assignment, and even though we were going to Lebanon, we never talked about that until we decided that we would come back to New Braunfels. And as a consequence, we resigned the assignment in ’67 or somewhere—
Goodbread: You need to tell me why you resigned or—
Winkler: Because we—our kids were our—
Goodbread: And your cover, about your cover—
Winkler: Oh, about my cover. Well, my cover was blown in any Central American area. There had been several efforts made to drug Mamie, as well as me, when we were together; they probably knew that we were working closely as agents for foreign intelligence. She looked quite Spanish, and she could have gotten by as a Spanish agent maybe, and I know there were times I was fluent enough in Spanish that people would think I was a native, they didn’t think I was an American because a lot of the people in Guatemala are Caucasian, like a lot of Italians down there are just as white as Americans, as many people you find right here in America. But my cover was blown and CIA knew it, so they couldn’t assign me in Central American or South America or Mexico, so they came up with an assignment in Lebanon, working for the State Department in a political, analyst-type assignment. Now, a political analyst can even work in a covert capacity and still be involved in overt activities, and you can’t tell if you got down there you might have been involved in the Cubans that were going into Angola because Castro was interested in supporting that African country at that time.
But it had been a long time since our family had been together and we weren’t burned out, we really enjoyed the Foreign Service assignment that we had, except that for the kids—at a time—if it had been, if they hadn’t had grandparents, they would have really been drifting. There were some Christmases we weren’t even together, and there were certain months that they never even got mail from us, and we seldom got replies from them, and I don’t think we talked once a year by telephone with them for a couple of years. It was deep cover, and I—the kids getting married gave us a good excuse to just want—we came back to Texas for the wedding, and we decided to stay right here. Marlena married Wilfred from New Braunfels, here. Wilfred Schlater, and Charles was graduating from A&M and he had a[n] offer to go with the Parks and Wildlife, so we knew he’d be in Texas, and we just stayed right here, and we’re very fortunate to almost immediately start working with the community council. And then the community council made a lot of strides at a time when demonstrations were very common, and there was a lot of—there were a lot of inequities that were reasonable by the minority groups, and I think in New Braunfels we too quickly expected to make an adjustment to those inequities, and you remember we had Steve Lopez, Nio Zamora, and Zeke Torres, all that were very prominent in the Mexican-American community. And they were disappointed in our lack of rapid progress in integrating certain programs, and I took it about as far as I could in four or five years’ time, and we had a very successful program, and we expanded in our operations, and we had one program, as I mentioned, Mainstream, where we had a $6 million budget, and we operated training for LVNs [licensed vocational nurses?] from here to San Angelo and Abilene, and our “Head Start” programs were very worthwhile.
Goodbread: Tell about the Head Start programs.
Winkler: Oh, I don’t know when Head Start got off the ground, but it was right around ’67 or somewhere along there, and I got the word from our regional—our state headquarters office in Dallas that we should attempt to activate a Head Start Program because this money was now available, and by some—
Goodbread: Now the Head Start Program was for pre-school—
Winkler: Pre-school children, age four and five, initially.
Goodbread: Aimed at normally—
Winkler: Indigent and lower-income children and it wasn’t hard to recognize that we had several pockets of poverty like that where kids needed attention. I didn’t have any good reason for going off, certainly wasn’t a thing where you’re going to Stonewall [Texas] for recognition because I hardly knew that Johnson [LBJ] was from Stonewall at that time. But, uh—
Goodbread: President Johnson?
Winkler: Yes, and we’d—we knew of a school that was available, and we knew of children that were needing this training, and there was a teacher that was willing to teach and handle the kids, and she spoke Spanish, and she was well-known in the community, and we had a representative, and we weren’t doing too much for Blanco County because our headquarters was right here in Comal County. So, Blanco felt they were getting the short end of the deal by being in an economic program, an economic development program where New Braunfels got the greatest share of the money because the administrative office was down here. We were as fair as we could be, but they were a smaller county, they had a lesser population, and it was more—we got a little more cooperation in implementing certain programs here, so when I saw that situation up there in Stonewall, I realized that this would be good place to try a Head Start Program, and sure enough, just like that, we got that—I talked with that teacher, and she said, “Well, I’m ready to start immediately,” and I said, “Can you start it in a week’s time and I’ll arrange with the superintendent of schools to get your textbooks and whatever else you need, and we’ll get some chalk and Crayolas and things of that sort for kids, and a primary teacher would supply you with other equipment,” and we reported to Dallas that we had a Head Start unit, and the next day I got a telegram from President Lyndon Johnson: “Congratulations Max on implementing the first Head Start Program in the United States.” The telegram disappeared from the file.
Goodbread: Oh, you’re kidding?
Winkler: Yes, I don’t know what happened to it, I think I may have made a copy of it that was lost in the flood, and I made a lot of—I had a log—
Goodbread: Oh, the flood when your home was flooded?
Winkler: Yes, we had water right up to the—well, eight feet high in that other room, it was up to the mantle and deeper here.
Goodbread: That was what, in ’70 —’72, right.
Winkler: And I had made a—I had a log, I had some pictures that were in violation of CIA, but I didn’t take some pictures that—I never had developed, but I had the films and I thought I’d get them developed, and I had in mind lecturing, not for any gratuity, anything of that sort, I just wanted to get the message to the United States, people in the United States on why and how the Bay of Pigs failed and why we now have communism in this hemisphere, and the failure was of air support, and it was a—naturally, you would expect Eisenhower to have complete confidence in the strategy, the military strategy of the Pentagon. Now, when Kennedy came in, he had confidence in Chester Bowles and Adlai Stevenson, and the Pentagon was secondary. He didn’t realize that if you’re going to put in twelve hundred guys on shore, foot soldiers, without any air cover, you’re going to have a hell of a time with a couple of Cuban tanks, Russian tanks, and one Russian MIG, and our airplanes on that—sitting twenty miles offshore, not even able to get off the deck. It was a horrible experience, and the Cubans—I—don’t—they just said everything they could over the air, every ugly word, at four o’clock in the morning, Mamie and I had cried—we just went to sleep crying, and that was—there wasn’t a lot—there were only two American advisors in training these guys, and one of them had a kid—by coincidence, one of the guys that participated in the training I’ve kept up with, and his name is Carl Jenkins, and he has a boy that graduated here four years ago, and Carl—after that program, he continued to work with CIA, and for some reason he separated, and he came to New Braunfels, and he was involved in doing probation officer work like Frank Allen is doing. And I walked into a meeting at city council, or school board meeting, and Carl was there, and I was just astounded, and he called me Max Martin.
Goodbread: Max Martin, isn’t that something.
Winkler: I did know Carl’s last name but I didn’t even know he was—that he had ever quit CIA. But he worked here a short while and he’s gone back with them, he’s gone now over into the Orient. His wife is very—well, she was very abreast of Russian affairs and worked at the Russian desk, and I imagine that something is happening in the Orient where she’s considered quite efficient. When you get a guy and a gal that have a passport that can get out of town in just a day’s notice, well, CIA is looking for you. We had three kids—
Goodbread: Once I’ve taped this, if I leave town real quick, you’ll know where I’m headed—somebody’s after me.
Winkler: I know we had three Cubans that were quite ill, and their illness was considered contagious in the encampment down there, and they wanted to send them to New York for treatment, and I escorted them up there, and the only reason I went was because I had a passport and I was available, I happened to be right on the spot. And it was just a week, I could be away from the Cuban operation in the early stages for a week’s time and not anything would happen. They didn’t miss me at all, I killed myself jogging those mountains with those guys, five o’clock in the morning, but if I had gone to Lebanon with our children all out of college and Edith [Max means Mamie here, not Edith] was, would have been hired in some capacity; see, it was a situation where there would be dual employment for husband and wife, they assured us of that. But she was a marvelous cook and enjoyed entertaining—
Goodbread: Oh, yes, Mamie was a—
Winkler: —and as a consequence, she would have gotten along real well with the ambassador and the diplomatic crew down there, but—
Goodbread: Well, I’m glad we got you here in New Braunfels; you’ve done a lot of great things for this city—
Winkler: —It was really a time when I had contemplated retirement, and I didn’t know what I was going to do, and it was wonderful to be right here, and even though I did accept the Seele [an elementary school in New Braunfels where Max was principal] assignment, it was from working with kids when you didn’t have—those kids at that age, secondary school and elementary, they didn’t have a dress code, they didn’t have a hair problem, they liked to be loved, and it was a real fine assignment. Different from anything I had in CIA, but after five years, I remembered Pete [superintendent of New Braunfels schools at that time] announced in a staff meeting, he said, “Well, we had a board meeting last night, and all the principals had a two-year extension on their contacts.” And I said, “My God, Pete, I’m already sixty-five.”
Goodbread: Sixty-five at that time. How old are you now?
Winkler: Eighty.
Goodbread: Eighty, God, a terrific eighty. How wonderful.
Winkler: Nah, it’s not a terrific eighty.
(Laughs)
End of interview