Frank Terpil, a former operative of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, who defected to Cuba in 1981 to avoid charges of criminal conspiracy, has died. He was 76. Terpil resigned from the CIA in 1970, allegedly after he was caught running a pyramid scheme in India, where he had been posted by the CIA. Soon after his forced resignation from the Agency, US federal prosecutors leveled criminal charges on Terpil and his business partner. The former CIA operative was also charged with conspiracy to commit murder, after it was found that he had helped facilitate the illegal transfer of over 20 tons of plastic explosives to the government of Libya.
Terpil managed to leave the US and
reappeared in Lebanon in 1980, shortly before a court in New York
sentenced him in absentia to five decades in prison for conspiring to
smuggle 10,000 submachine guns to African warlords, including Uganda’s
dictator Idi Amin. As agents of various countries started to zero in on
Terpil’s Lebanon hideout, he disappeared again and resurfaced
in 1981 in Havana, Cuba. Shortly afterwards, Cuba’s General
Intelligence Directorate hired him as an operative under the operational
alias CURIEL. Since that time, Terpil has been repeatedly mentioned as
having played a part in Cuban intelligence operations around the world,
but rarely gave interviews. He appeared
again in 2014, however, in a documentary entitled “Mad Dog: Inside the
Secret World of Muammar Gaddafi”. The film was made by British company
Fresh One Productions on behalf of Showtime, an American premium cable
and satellite television network. In the documentary, Terpil admitted
that he helped the Libyan dictator “eliminate” his opponents —most of
them Libyan exiles living abroad.
British newspaper The Observer, which published
news or Terpil’s death, said the former CIA operative’s legal status in
Cuba “was never quite clear”. He had allegedly expressed concerns in
recent months that the rapprochement between Washington and Havana could
threaten his sanctuary in the Caribbean island. His Cuban wife told The Observer
that complications from diabetes had caused his legs to be amputated in
recent months. She told the paper that Terpil “died peacefully” on
March 1, of heart failure.
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