[USA Today] The World War II veteran with the top-secret job hid a lot from his 12-year-old daughter. But on this day, he opened up about how suspicious it seemed: The accused assassin of John F. Kennedy getting shot and killed on live TV, during a transfer between jails. Today, Lilliam remembers her dad "being sort of angry that we weren’t going to get any answers... and just really wondering about it: Was it (Lee Harvey) Oswald who shot the president like we all thought? And he conveniently gets shot himself?"
She wouldn’t know for four more years that this was not simply idle speculation about danger and deception surrounding the president’s 1963 murder. Her dad was a deep-cover CIA operative whose life had been dedicated to danger and deception.
A secret war the White House waged against Cuba provided both in abundance. And the spy was often in the thick of the adventure. Fate would sideline him at a crucial moment, when Fidel Castro took control of the island nation. But that didn’t derail his dedication to fighting communism ‐ until a personal demon destroyed his career.
The spy was Ross Lester Crozier, who died in obscurity in 2000. Details of his role in history remained buried in 944 pages of classified Central Intelligence Agency documents until their release, bit by bit, starting two years ago.
A CIA assessment of Ross Crozier's interactions with Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara.
In those files, reinforced by recollections of his daughter and of former operatives who worked under him, Crozier emerges as a real-life James Bond. He interacted with major players of tumultuous events involving Cuba and the Cold War from the mid-1950s to the early ’60s. He crossed paths with spies who would later be arrested in the 1972 burglary of Democratic offices at Washington’s Watergate complex, which took down another president.
Prior to Cuba’s revolution, he managed to develop a rapport with its two biggest icons ‐ Castro and aide Ernesto "Che" Guevara, whose name and image today are synonymous with revolution.
Crozier also was the agency’s official liaison for a CIA-funded group of young, exiled Cubans who opposed both Castro and Guevara.
Through those students, he learned that the Soviet Union had placed missiles in Cuba capable of striking the U.S. and passed this intelligence on to Washington. But his reports went nowhere, he complained to a researcher in his later years ‐ a lost opportunity with the potential to change the course of history by preempting the Cuban Missile Crisis.