Felix Ismael Rodriguez Mendigutia

Well-known as Felix Ramos Medina, “Felix the Cat” and Max Gomez. He was born in 1941 in Cuba. At the triumph of the Revolution he went to the United States where he was recruited by the CIA.

In 1960 he received terrorist training in the Panama Channel. At the end of that year he proposed to the CIA a plan to murder Cuban leader Fidel Castro. He belonged to the Anti-communist Legion of the Caribbean in the Dominican Republic. He was also a member of the Cuban Constitutionalist Crusade (CCC) along with Pedro Luis Diaz Lanz and Frank Sturgis.

He worked in groups infiltrating Cuba and carried out the first action on February 14, 1961 in the Arches de Canasi area of Matanzas Province; there he disembarked and buried two tons of equipment and explosives. He conveyed instructions from the CIA so that the internal counterrevolutionary forces could carry out sabotage at the moment the invasion took place at the Bay of Pigs.

Felix Rodriguez was mercenary No. 2718. When the invasion at the Bay of Pigs was defeated, he hid in the house of a counterrevolutionary; there he obtained the assistance of a European official based in Cuba who negotiated his asylum in the Venezuelan embassy. He left for Caracas on September 13, 1961.

In 1963 he participated in operations against Cuba from Central America. He worked with a group of agents in a CIA operations base in Nicaragua. Subsequently he worked as the principal agent of the CIA in the Miami office and later carried out missions in Venezuela.

Felix Rodriguez was assigned to Bolivia, along with other Cuban agents, when U.S. intelligence services detected the presence of Commander Ernesto Che Guevara in that country. He resided in the city of Santa Cruz in the Sierra Valley and later in Valle Grande. On October 9, 1967 he left aboard a helicopter to La Higuera, where he tried to brutally interrogate the heroic guerilla fighter; he took a picture with him. Once he murdered Che, Rodriguez returned to the United States.

In an interview carried out with journalist Claudio Gatti, Rodriguez pointed out the following, “… I left and I sent Teran to carry out the order. I told him that he should shoot him (Che) below the neck because he had to seem to have been killed in combat. Teran requested a rifle and entered in the room with a couple of soldiers. I wrote in my notebook: 1:10 pm, October 9, 1967.”

In 1968 the CIA sent him on a mission in Ecuador to train an anti-terrorism and counter-insurgency unit. At the end of that year he was assigned to Peru where he worked in the Department of Defense.

In 1969 he was granted U.S. citizenship and asked to volunteer in South Vietnam, where he served for 25 months as a civilian employee with the rank of major in the U.S. army.

From August 1979, he began to support to the Nicaraguan contras. Between 1979 and 1981 he traveled through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica to “fight communism,” according to him. In 1982 he devised a program to confront the national liberation movements in those countries.

In the 1980’s he organized terrorist attacks against Cuban merchant ships that transported merchandise to Nicaragua. In 1984, he forged an attack plan against then Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordova. In 1985 he was an envoy for the CIA to El Salvador.

He was linked to the Iran-Contra scandal, accused of participating in trafficking weapons and drugs in collusion with the CIA and the Nicaraguan contras. He was acquitted when evidence against him mysteriously disappeared.

In April 1998 he was selected and later confirmed in 2000 as Secretary of International Relations of the 2506 Brigade. He also appeared in August 2001 in the position of Governmental Relations point person within the Council of Directors of the Revolutionary Recovery Movement in Miami.