Felix Rodriguez
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Felix Rodriguez is a Cuban-American former Central Intelligence Agency officer involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War, reported to have been present at the 1967 killing of Che Guevara in Bolivia. He is a distinct figure from Jose Rodriguez, the post-9/11 CIA official who ordered the destruction of the agency's waterboarding tapes.

John Kiriakou recounts that podcast host Danny Jones and his co-host Steven interviewed Rodriguez in Miami; Kiriakou notes that the trip followed an appearance by Danny Sheehan, who told Jones he had deposed Rodriguez and alleged Rodriguez had been "on the team that killed the president", an allegation Kiriakou attributes to Sheehan rather than endorsing himself.

In a separate account of the same trip, Kiriakou recalls that the Bay of Pigs chief he initially had in mind when discussing his post-9/11 CIA branch, staffed largely by retired senior officers who volunteered to return as contractors, was not Rodriguez, but a different, older officer; Rodriguez, he clarifies, was a distinct figure who had "worked for him." He and his co-host Steven traveled to a museum in South Florida in Miami, one of the only interviews they ever conducted requiring travel, to interview Rodriguez in person.

Che Guevara and denial of souvenir-taking

Asked directly whether he had kept Che Guevara's Rolex as a souvenir, Rodriguez denied it: "No, no, no, no. I never kept his ro[lex]." Kiriakou notes that, separately from the Rolex denial, rumors persist that Rodriguez kept Che's fingers as a souvenir.

The Havana CIA museum

Kiriakou says he visited the CIA museum in Havana, which displays items confiscated from Rodriguez and other Bay of Pigs fighters; the museum is housed in a mansion across the street from the Tunisian embassy and holds CIA identification, weapons, and related material from the era.

Billy Waugh

Kiriakou compares Rodriguez to [[billy-waugh]], the legendary Special Forces and CIA paramilitary officer, saying the two men were "very similar" and that the wars they fought shaped them in the same way. Kiriakou says he met Waugh on a joint operation in the Middle East lasting several months, returning to the U.S. on September 9, 2001, two days before the 9/11 attacks. Waugh, he recalls, drove with a vanity license plate reading "17 hits" beside a Purple Heart symbol, insisting to Kiriakou it was genuine and joking that "some sorry ass son of a bitch in North Carolina has 18." Weeks after 9/11, Waugh told Kiriakou he had been in Afghanistan "killing people," while Kiriakou, one of only two fluent Arabic speakers then in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, was kept behind because the mission, focused on killing rather than interrogating, did not need a translator.

Kiriakou recounts several of Waugh's war stories, some corroborated in Annie Jacobsen's book Surprise Kill Vanish: that his first kill, in Vietnam, was cutting a woman's throat with a serrated dagger; that he was shot down behind enemy lines in Vietnam, his pilot killed, and walked roughly 25 miles south on a bullet-shredded leg to reach friendly lines, earning a Silver Star and his first Purple Heart; and an embellished account of cutting a cow's artery in a rice paddy to drink its blood for nourishment during the trek, which Kiriakou likened to a scene from Apocalypse Now. Kiriakou says Waugh, who never had children, treated the military as his entire life, after being declared disabled following his first combat injury, he hitchhiked across the country trying to convince the CIA to send him back into the field.

See also

- Jose Rodriguez
- John Kiriakou
