To end the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev publicly agreed to remove Russian missiles from the island. In secret, President Kennedy agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey, which were aimed at the Soviet Union. The public never knew about the secret deal, so it looked like the Soviets had backed down which angered members of the Soviet politburo. A few months later, they would depose Khrushchev.

The deal also angered Fidel Castro. He wanted the missiles in Cuba as a deterrent against an American invasion. Members of the U.S. military were itching to go after communist Cuba, and Castro knew it. So Castro pulled a sneaky. Before the Russians could get the nuclear warheads out of Cuba, Castro, in cahoots with dissident Russian military officers, stole five of the warheads and hid them in caves. This was made easier by the blundering Kennedy administration that did not insist on onsite inspections in Cuba. In fact, under the terms of the agreement, the U.S. could not conduct such inspections until 1988.

A few months after Castro’s theft of the warheads, they were moved from the caves and taken to an abandoned Hershey’s Chocolate warehouse in Havana where a brilliant ruse was finalized. A rogue Russian nuclear weapon specialist and a Cuban intelligence officer converted the warheads into portable time bombs.

It was amazingly simple. They had the engines removed from towable generators and inserted a warhead inside each generator shell. The warheads could only be detonated with special codes which were known only to the Russian weapon specialist and Fidel Castro himself.

Once the warheads were installed inside the generators, they were taken to Veracruz, Mexico, one by one aboard fishing boats. From there, the towable nuclear bombs were hooked to the back of a pick-up truck, driven north to the U.S. border and taken across at McAllen, Texas. Nobody pays much attention to a couple of Mexicans in a beat-up pick-up truck towing a generator. In l963, Border Patrol Agents were on the lookout for infested citrus fruit, not nuclear warheads inside generators.

As Castro would later boast, “The gringos don’t even notice Mexicans in pickup trucks. They’re just wetbacks coming across the border to get work. And junkyards?  No one likes to look at a junkyard.  It was so easy, it was laughable.”

From McAllen, the first warhead was delivered to a junkyard near the Houston ship channel, which also is home to a vast petroleum and petrochemical complex. A nuclear bomb detonated in Houston would destroy the busiest seaport in the U.S., and nearly one-third of its petroleum output. Other “eggs” would be laid in New Orleans, Norfolk Virginia (home of the Sixth Fleet), Washington, D.C., and New York City, hidden in plain sight in salvage yards in each of these strategic cities.

Who needs ballistic missiles when you have nuclear time bombs on the ground in target cities that can be detonated by radio signals?

Fidel Castro now had a huge advantage which gave his confidence a shot in the arm. This greatly emboldened the Cuban dictator which might account for Cuba’s involvement in communist uprisings throughout Latin America and Africa. He wasn’t afraid to tweak our noses, which he did quite often for the remainder of the 20^th century.

Obviously, the bombs were never detonated, so what happened to them? Nobody knows for sure. Did Fidel Castro ever share the secret codes with his brother Raul, who took over after Fidel’s death in 2016? The detonation devices have a shelf life of about 100 years. What will happen then? Will the devices fail and the bombs explode? We’ll know in about 40 years.

Or maybe the bombs are no longer here. Maybe Castro, in a saner moment, removed them. Probably not. Even though they are highly mobile, why risk moving nuclear weapons around unless they were in danger of being discovered. That’s not very likely since hardly anyone knew of their existence in the first place, not even the vaunted FBI and CIA. Apparently, it was easy to hide things from both agencies back in the 1960s. Not only was Cuba able to drive five A-bombs right across the Rio Grande into the U.S., Russia was able to ship 75 nuclear missiles and 50,000 combat troops to support them halfway around the world and sneak them into Cuba right under our noses. If a British intelligence agent hadn’t discovered the plot while working undercover at KGB headquarters in Moscow, we might have never known about the Russian invasion of Cuba, and the missile crisis would have been averted.

Lee Harvey Oswald Uncovers the Plot While on a Clandestine Mission to Cuba for General Edwin Walker.

It took a spy wannabe to uncover the hidden A-bomb story: Lee Harvey Oswald. The loser, the patsy, the schmuck Oswald went to Cuba in September, 1963, as a freelance spy for General Edwin Walker and the John Birch Society, looking for information that would embarrass JFK. He came back with a lot of circumstantial evidence that pointed to the possibility of hidden A-bombs in the U.S., but nothing concrete enough to convince Walker.

Since Walker didn’t believe him, Oswald made the mistake of telling Maurice Bishop, a.k.a. David Atlee Phillips, who in turn told E. Howard Hunt who just happened to be busy with a fake assassination attempt on the life of President John F. Kennedy. Hunt is the genius who came up with the idea of faking an assassination of the president to rile up the American people for an invasion of Cuba. Hunt made the mistake of telling fellow CIA operative Frank Sturgis, who actually was a double agent working for Fidel Castro. When Castro learns of the fake attempt on the life of JFK, he figures why not make it real? He hijacks the event and sends his own shooter to carry out the assassination. After all, Castro was right in the middle of moving his atomic time bombs into the U.S. The death of Kennedy would make the perfect smoke screen.

Castro Orders the Death of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sends Jack Ruby to Carry It Out.

Fidel Castro also needed to shut up Oswald before he could blab to anyone else about the hidden nuclear bombs. Fidel was trying to get word to his female assassin in Dallas, Pilar Rivera, but events in Dealey Plaza unfolded before she got the message. Following Kennedy’s assassination and Oswald’s arrest, Castro sends Celia Sanchez to Dallas to meet with Jack Ruby. Celia orders Ruby to kill Oswald before the CIA can interrogate him, thus Ruby’s idiotic murder of Oswald on national television. In fairness to Ruby, he had no alternative. It was “an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

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