James donovan fidel castro biography

Fidel Castro and a New York insurance lawyer named James Donovan stood together on the tarmac of San Antonio de los Baños Airfield in Cuba and watched as hundreds of just-released prisoners of war boarded a caravan of planes bound for Miami. It was December 23, 1962. Only the night before, Castro had given Donovan an ornate humidor filled to the brim with 200 cigars—a gift to celebrate the successful culmination of a long, contentious set of negotiations to gain the freedom of the CIA-led exile invasion force defeated and captured at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.

Donovan was the most famous international negotiator in the United States, if not the world.

In early 1962, he had
arranged a prisoner exchange with the Kremlin—the release of Francis Gary Powers, a CIA U-2 pilot shot down over Russia while on a reconnaissance mission, for veteran KGB spy Col. Rudolf Abel, captured by the FBI in New York. With all the drama of a Hollywood thriller, the Cold War spy swap took place in the