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Mexico City : Three former Mexican presidents supported the US secret service Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its clandestine campaign against Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the 1960s and 1970s, according to a US journalist, reported EFE news agency on Monday.
Former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley said he will publish his investigative book based on declassified US documents that show Mexico provided assistance to the failed "Bay of Pigs" invasion in April 1961 aimed at toppling Castro's government, the news agency quoted the El Universal newspaper as saying.
Morley, the author of Our man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, said Adolfo Lopez Mateos, who was Mexico's president from 1958-1964, authorised "under the table" help for the CIA by handling the delivery of 50,000 gallons of fuel for the boats that were used in the abortive invasion.
According to Morley, Mateos and also former president Gustavo Diaz Ordaz - in office from 1964-1970, - were spies in the pay of the CIA, and they collaborated during their administrations with the US intelligence agency.
The journalist says when US president John F. Kennedy came to power in 1961, it was the CIA and not the State Department that had an "institutional relationship with Mexico".
The Mexican authorities granted, among other things, "entry permits" to Cuban counter revolutionaries from November 1960 and allowed installation of interception and recording equipment to listen to telephone calls between the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico during those years.
The book revolves around Winston Scott who was the CIA chief in Mexico from 1956 to 1969. Scott was close to Lopez Mateos, Diaz Ordaz and the latter's successor, Luis Echeverria, who governed Mexico from 1970-1976 and prior to that, was the interior minister in the Ordaz cabinet.
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