Veterans of a notorious Miami-based CIA dirty tricks team have boasted that they were helped by British Intelligence officers to sink an East German ship loaded with British-built Leyland buses.
Three years after the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the MV Magdeburg was hit by a Japanese ship in the River Thames. When the Magdeburg rolled over and sank, one of Britain’s biggest ever vehicle export orders was irreparably damaged. Most of the 42 Leyland buses fell into the sea.
It was a black day for Leyland, the Lancashire firm which was then the world’s biggest commercial vehicle exporter. The buses were the second consignment of a $12.2 million order for 400 Leyland Olympics, placed by Fidel Castro’s government.
The CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami was working on a world-wide effort to strangle Cuban trade.(1) They had learned that Castro had signed a further option with Leyland to buy a thousand buses in a larger 20 million dollar deal.
The newly-elected British prime minister, Harold Wilson, refused to give in to American pressure and block the Leyland deal. The US Commerce Secretary, Luther Hodges, declared publicly and ominously: ‘I don’t like it a bit. That hurts us.’
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson was running for reelection in 1964 and was infuriated by the Leyland deal. He secretly forced the Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson to promise that Canada would not make any similar trade deals with Cuba.
The KGB chief in Washington, Aleksandr Feliksov, reported this to Moscow Centre on May 20, 1964, warning that President Johnson appeared even more intolerant of Cuba than the assassinated Kennedy and was not only agreeing to the political and economic isolation of Cuba but seemed more ready for military action.
Arguments about the hugely valuable Leyland deal were raging worldwide when the MV Magdeburg left Rostock in East Germany, loaded with hundreds of tons of Communist-built farm machinery, diesel engines, bicycles, electrical equipment and chemicals for Cuba. Early on October 26, she berthed briefly at Williams No 4 Jetty at Dagenham, Essex, to load 42 Leyland buses for Havana, mostly as deck cargo, before sailing back down the Thames estuary that night.
On the same day, the captain of the new 10,032 ton Japanese freighter Yamashiro Maru received orders to sail for London, empty in ballast, from the River Schelde in Belgium.
The two ships were bound to pass in the night.
At 01h 52 on October 27, the Magdeburg swung to starboard for a tight right-hand turn in the dredged channel around Broadness Point, near Northfleet Hope, Kent. The inward bound Yamashiro Maru, which should have been passing Magdeburg on her port side, slammed into her starboard side, holing the East German ship below the waterline and nearly killing her captain in his wheelhouse.
Next morning’s television news displayed the 6,629 ton Magdeburg lying on her side on a sandbank, with her deck cargo of Leyland buses falling, one by one, into the River Thames. Newspapers and the authoritative Lloyds Maritime Casualties publication all reported that the collision had happened in ‘thick fog’ and the editor of the magazine Sea Breezes commented: ‘Fog on the Thames usually brings its problems and its casualties each winter and this season proved to be no exception.’
There was no court of inquiry, but an investigation by solicitors, working for an out-of-court settlement between the state-owned East German DSR line and the Japanese NYK Line, was greatly complicated when the March 1965 issue of the maritime magazine Sea Breezes carried a letter from two cadets, Alan Reid and Jeremy Martin, who had been on board the training ship HMS Worcester that night and implied that they had seen the collision, stating that the morning fog had only closed in after the Magdeburg had heeled over on her beam ends. The 15 year-old cadets were inevitably questioned by lawyers and had to withdraw their claim to have seen the Magdeburg from their training ship.
One of the cadets, now living in South Africa, Captain Alan Reid, managing director of the P & I marine insurance surveyors in Durban and a former container ship captain, said:
‘I still remember the uproar it caused with the various solicitors investigating the cause of the collision. Needless to say, neither of us saw the vessel or collision, only the aftermath, in clear light of the day. I can still remember the dressing down we both received from the captain superintendent of the Worcester after the solicitors had finished with us!’
In 1964 Leyland had been the biggest heavy vehicle exporters in the world and in Latin America they had been holding off a mighty challenge from General Motors for decades, selling reliable Lancashire-built buses under the famous nameplate ‘El Omnibus Ingles Leyland’. But the boardroom minute book of the now bankrupt firm, held in the British Commercial Vehicle Museum at Leyland, shows that the Magdeburg collision provoked a serious supply and contractual problem, with late delivery on the Cuban order by MCW, the Birmingham firm who were fitting Olympic bus bodies to the Leyland Worldmaster running gear.
The Cubans complained bitterly and in December 1964, the Leyland Journal treated the loss at sea of 42 buses worth £300,000 as bad news: ‘Leyland, with order books full, does not welcome the extra work.’
Cursed by slow delivery from underfinanced British component suppliers and starved of investment [diverted to car making subsidiaries acquired at the suggestion of the Labour government] Leyland lost out to GM in the Latin American bus market.
Enter Jack Anderson
No-one at Leyland appears to have suspected any skullduggery until 1975, when a Washington Post headline ‘CIA Accused in ’64 Thames Collision’ appeared on a story from the Capitol Hill columnist Jack Anderson. Anderson and Les Wilton reported that sources in the Central Intelligence Agency and the secretive National Security Agency were confirming their suspicion that the
‘….mishap on the Thames was quietly arranged by the CIA to keep the buses from reaching Cuba. Long before the deal was arranged the US government became aware of the negotiations and sought to smash the sale. It would rip an immense hole, Washington feared, in the economic embargo. Officially, US spokesmen warned that any vessel handling buses to Cuba would be blacklisted and denied government-financed cargoes. Unofficially, the CIA began looking for ways to prevent the delivery of the buses. British Intelligence kept Washington advised, according to our sources, on progress of the negotiations and shipping arrangements. The information came in part from a wiretap the British maintained on Cuban offices in London, our sources say. The information was transmitted, like other intelligence of mutual interest, by diplomatic pouch to a British intelligence liaison officer in the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. Details about the buses were relayed by telex to the CIA. The first shipment of 16 Leyland buses nevertheless arrived safely in Havana aboard an East German cargo ship on July 15, 1964. Our sources don’t know whether the CIA attempted to sabotage the ship. Perhaps there wasn’t enough fog in the Thames for a successful ramming. But the fog was just right when the Magdeburg started off with the second wad of buses.’
The Washington Post quoted a Leyland spokesman, David Boole, as saying: ‘A deliberate sinking was certainly something we were blissfully ignorant of.’
In August 1975, in an article entitled ‘The Kennedy Vendetta’, published in Harper’s magazine, authors Taylor Branch and George Crile III quoted the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence Ray Cline:
‘We were sending agents to Europe to get in touch with shippers to discourage them from going to Cuba. There were some actions to sabotage cargoes, to contaminate them, things like that.’
Branch and Crile quoted another CIA officer:
‘There was a special technical staff in Langley working on these problems, They were economically oriented and they would come up with all kinds of grand plans for disrupting the Cuban economy – everything from preventing the Cubans from getting credit to figuring out how to disrupt sugar sales. There was lots of sugar being sent out from Cuba and we were putting a lot of contaminants in it. We would even open up boxes and chip off a gear lock on a machine. There were all kinds of sabotage acts. We would have our people pour invisible, untraceable chemicals into lubricating fluids that were being shipped to Cuba. It was all planned economic retrogression. Those fluids were going to be used for diesel engines, and that mean parts would wear out faster than they could get replacements. Before we sabotaged a product like that, we would go to the manufacturer and see if we could convince him to do it; if that didn’t work we would just put the science-fiction crap in ourselves when the shipment was en route. We were really doing almost anything you could dream up. One of our more sophisticated operations was convincing a ball-bearing manufacturer in Frankfurt, Germany, to produce a shipment of ball bearings off centre. Another was to get a manufacturer to do the same with some balanced wheel gears. You’re talking about big money when you ask a manufacturer to go along with you on that kind of project because he has to reset his whole mould. And he is probably going to worry about the effect on future business. You might have to pay him several hundred thousand dollars, or more. I’m rather sceptical about that story about the Thames collision. I would have known, if it were true. But it is true that we were sabotaging the Leyland buses going to Cuba from England and that was pretty sensitive business.’
The American author William B. Breuer, dedicated his recent book Vendetta!, a history of the covert war against Cuba, to:
‘Theodore Shackley, who served the United States with great honour and distinction as an Army officer and as a high-ranking CIA official in times of enormous world tension’.
Breuer cited Ted Shackley and W, Raymond Wannall of the FBI as two of his sources and wrote:
‘One of JM WAVE’s most notable successes was in convincing a ball-bearing manufacturer in Frankfurt, West Germany, to make a large order of crucial ball-bearings off center, so that these items would be useless when they arrived in Cuba. A similar success was scored with a manufacturer of balanced wheel gears in Lyon, France. Money was no problem for JM WAVE, not with Jack and Bobby Kennedy solidly backing nearly any scheme to dethrone Castro. JM/WAVE agents also were able to sabotage buses manufactured in England and shipped to Cuba. When these shiny new vehicles arrived, they were impressive to behold. However, when put into service, the buses were constantly breaking down, giving Castro an image of ineptness in the eyes of many Cuban citizens.’
A London-based television reporter, Simon Neave, attempted to nail the American story by tracking down the British pilots who were on duty on board the Magdeburg and the Yamshiro Maru. Both the Trinity House pilots were officers in the Royal Naval Reserve and were above suspicion of criminally arranging a maritime accident for the Central Intelligence Agency.
But one of them, Commodore Gordon Greenfield, the RNVR’s highest ranking officer, in an interview at his home in Rochester in February 1993, did reveal that the cadets on HMS Worcester were correct in saying there was no fog at the time of the collision. He told Simon Neave:
‘It has been suggested that the CIA arranged the collision. But that cannot have been possible. I only took the East German ship at the last minute, by swapping places with another pilot. The Japanese ship was piloted by Gerald Johnson who had been requested by the Japanese. They hit a little oil tanker before running into us but it was not foggy until half an hour after the crash. I was wide on the river. They ran into our bridge, nearly killing the East German captain and hitting us below the waterline. I beached us using the engine, which was still running.’
Commodore Greenfield said he had never discussed the incident with the other pilot and Capt Johnson later declined to discuss the incident with Simon Neave.
Captain Johnson commanded a British warship in the Second World War and was described, by a retired pilot and former mayor of Gravesend Capt. Dan Macmillan as ‘a stiff upper-lipped wartime Royal Navy man who still played a round of golf in his nineties.’
A historian of Thames shipping, Stuart Bond, years ago worked out that the two cadets on HMS Worcester could not have seen the Magdeburg collision. At his home in Tonbridge, Kent, he said:
‘The CIA could not have managed to interfere with the work of two Trinity House pilots. That is surely beyond belief – even for them. But I do accept that the timing of the shipping movements and the tides would have dictated that the inward bound ship from Antwerp was bound to meet the Magdeburg at some point in the Thames.’
‘Beyond belief, even for them?’ I wonder.
Notes
- The CIA’s JM/WAVE Miami station, was their biggest in the continental USA, running 3000 Cuban subagents, 55 dummy corporations, clandestine radio stations, gunsmiths, detective bureaux, ship charter firms and boat repair workshops, based in the former Richmond naval air station and hiding behind a sign that read ‘US GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS PROHIBIT DISCUSSION OF THIS ORGANISATION OR FACILITY’. Its sabotage operations were run by station chief Theodore ‘Ted’ Shackley, who had led the Brigade 2506 amphibious landings at the Bay of Pigs and organised Operation Mongoose, a series of covert actions that included attempts to murder Fidel Castro.