To strangers, ex-CIA officer Frank Terpil was ‘Robert Hunter’ - a retired Australian living with his young Cuban wife in a modest home outside Havana. It was a good cover story, just believable enough to distract from the New Yorker’s accent and intimate knowledge of weapons and Mideast politics.

Some in the CIA suspected Terpil had gone rogue, recruited by Cuba’s main spy agency, the General Intelligence Directorate. But did the CIA ever really let him go?
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Frank Terpil: the making of a spy

Frank Terpil was born in Brooklyn in 1939 and joined the CIA’s technical services division in the ‘60s, a department that specialized in adapting weaponry and technology for clandestine and covert operations. He was also a GS-8 electronic eavesdropping expert and, according to author Joseph J. Trento, one of the CIA's biggest embarrassments.

He was posted to India in 1970, enjoying the life of an expat with a large house and a new Cadillac, happily bugging his way through New Delhi. To bump up his Agency salary, Terpil reportedly took advantage of Afghanistan currency traders who were overvaluing the Indian rupee. He would ship plane loads of hard currency to Kabul, convert the cash into rupees, then re-exchange the rupees in Delhi at a profit.

Although the details are murky, Terpil was apparently asked to leave the agency for misconduct a year later. Trento said he was fired from the CIA in India for being absent when the India-Pakistan war broke out. Some suggested he was running a pyramid scheme. Terpil’s version of the story is that he went “freelance”, working for Edwin P. Wilson, another ex-CIA officer convicted of illegally selling weapons to Libya. Wilson’s conviction wasn’t clear cut, however. While Wilson officially retired from the CIA in 1971, he continued to work for the Agency as a freelancer, according to the Houston-based judge who overturned Wilson’s conviction.

The case led to questions about whether Terpil was also still on the CIA payroll while living the life of an international arms dealer.

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Frank Terpil’s Cuban hideaway

The New Yorker described Terpil as “not one to suffer from a guilty conscience”.

Terpil happily told his story to television documentarians over the years. Inside his Cuban home, Terpil recalled how he helped ‘facilitate’ the world’s maverick regimes supplying arms and surveillance equipment in the Middle East. He apparently met Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in London in the 1970s and offered his services to the Libyan dictator - procuring everything from exploding ashtrays to American mercenaries. 

Terpil also did business with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the late 1970s, who called Terpil by his nickname ‘Waraki’ (white lightning). In the 1982 documentary, Confessions of a Dangerous Man, Terpil recalled the end of Amin’s rule in 1979. Terpil was in Entebbe, on the presidential plane destined for Libya, and reminisced about loading gold onto the aircraft before takeoff.

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Frank Terpil and the long arm of the law

The Guardian described Terpil as a “coldly intelligent” dealmaker and confidant of dictators including the Shah of Iran. The ex-CIA officer apparently became more talkative the more he drank. “After a few shots of rum, he would let his guard down.”

In 1980, Terpil was indicted by a US court on arms charges related to the delivery of plastic explosives and 10,000 machine guns to Libya. He skipped bail, was sentenced to 53 years in absentia, and resurfaced in Lebanon, Syria, and finally Havana where Terpil branded himself a “business consultant” to the Cuban government.

In Castro’s Secrets, former CIA analyst Brian Latell said Terpil allegedly used the codename Curiel (guinea pig) and worked as a Cuban ‘spotter’ in bait operations, trying to persuade CIA officers to defect. Terpil insisted he didn’t share the communist ideology, however: “I told Fidel when I got off the plane, I’m no f****** communist.”

Nonetheless, in 1987 Terpil traveled to Bratislava - at the time communist Czechoslovakia - on a forged Cuban passport with two Cuban DGI intelligence officers hoping to recruit a 'supposedly’ disaffected CIA computer specialist. "He was to be offered $500,000 for his services but did not appear at an arranged rendezvous," Latell wrote.

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Havana’s guest? 

It was never clear if Terpil was under house arrest in Havana. Latell said he was housed courtesy of the Cuban government at the Hemingway Marina outside of Havana in a residence “liberally seeded with concealed bugs and cameras”.

Terpil stayed close to home with his young Cuban wife Nurys, who he referred to as his ‘jail master’. Nurys said Terpil died peacefully of heart failure at their home in March 2016. His death came just weeks before former President Barack Obama was due to visit. Questions lingered about the timing and whether Terpil had faked his own death before the American contingent arrived en masse.

“He no doubt would have relished the prospect,” The Guardian said in its obituary.