Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

by Vince Houghton

By the end of 1962, JM/WAVE grew to become the largest CIA station in the world other than the Agency’s headquarters in Langley. It employed three to four hundred professional CIA officers, as well as an estimated fifteen thousand Cuban exiles (including Felix), all engaged in monitoring Cuba and dreaming up plans for its leader’s demise. According to some accounts, the CIA was one of Miami’s largest employers during this period (if not the largest), possibly accounting for a full third of the city’s economy. CIA spooks needed to buy houses (both personal and safe houses), cars, cover companies, furniture, groceries, marinas, hunting camps (for training), merchant shipping, exile-operated publishing houses (for producing propaganda), and more. JM/WAVE had three or four people employed just to organize and manage real estate. They even operated a gaggle of boats and aircraft, so many that the CIA maritime fleet was the third largest in the Caribbean, after only the American and Cuban navies.