Wyoming History: The CIA Informant Who Survived 14 Years In A Cuban Prison

A former Wyoming rancher made headlines from Cuba in the 1950s and 1960s as the island underwent its revolution from a corrupt dictator in league with the U.S. mafia to another dictator named Fidel Castro who teamed up with Russia.

Lawrence Kirby Lunt Jr., a World War II and Korean War veteran, had been running cattle and managing a 5,000-acre ranch purchased in conjunction with his Belgian wife’s family north of Havana when the CIA came calling. Under CIA guidance, he recruited Cuban informants, helped get photos of Russian missile sites, and offered a clandestine drop zone for the agency.

But as the walls of oppression grew tighter in Cuba and U.S. opposition to Castro grew stiffer, the one-time Wheatland resident became a person of interest to Castro’s regime. And in 1965, the premier’s intelligence apparatus closed in on him, refusing to allow him to fly out of the country to attend his parents’ 50th anniversary on a New Mexico ranch.

Lunt was picked up by secret police a day or so later as he headed to a Havana apartment that he used for intelligence purposes.

“Two More Arrested in Cuba,” the New York Times reported on May 28, 1965. “Two additional Americans have been arrested in Cuba in what seems to be a campaign of increasing repression by Premier Fidel Castro’s government against foreigners.”

The paper reported that a 72-year-old widow had been arrested who had resided in Cuba since 1920 and Lunt, 41, was also arrested on May 6. The paper said the exact nature of the charges had not been determined.

Ten months later, Lunt made U.S. headlines again as he was sentenced to 30 years in Cuban prison for spying.

“Santa Fe Man Held Cuban Prisoner,” the Sunday New Mexican front-page headline read on March 13, 1966. “A former U.S. Air Force captain and longtime Cuban resident has been sentenced to 30 years in prison on charges of espionage for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.”

14-Year Separation


Family efforts to free Lunt, first by his father, a prominent psychiatrist of the same name, and a brother, a well-known doctor and rancher in Saratoga, Wyoming, took 14 years and involved confidential presidential memos about his fate and a potential prisoner swap.

Lunt’s father died in 1968, never seeing his son’s freedom.

In the end, President Jimmy Carter’s administration made the deal and then Wyoming Gov. Ed Herschler and Dr. John Lunt, the Saratoga, Wyoming, brother of Lawrence Lunt, were on the plane in September 1979 that arrived in Cuba to return him and three others.

“He was a man that really was fighting for his country, and he went at it twice during the wars and then the third time with the CIA,” said Larry Lunt, his youngest son, who founded Armonia, a family office in Greenwich, Connecticut that focuses on investments in regeneration of land and healthy local food systems. “So obviously, a man with a strong ideal and a desire of defending justice and using the strength of the United States to actually do that. He was a proud man, but he was a man that respected others and cared about democracy and cared about people.”

Lawrence Kirby Lunt Jr. was born in 1925 to Dr. Lawrence Kirby Lunt and his wife, Marjory. He attended Noble and Greenough School, a college prep school, in a Boston suburb. Following graduation, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and served as a radar operator and navigator in a night fighter squadron in the Pacific.

Lunt, in a book about his experiences in Cuba titled “Leave Me My Spirit,” wrote that after World War II he attended Harvard University and was too distracted by the women at Radcliffe College and elsewhere to make his grades.

His parents had moved to Wyoming and purchased a ranch in Wheatland. He followed them and found something he enjoyed.

'Happy Ranching'


“Happy ranching was interrupted by Air Force reserve status recalling me for two years in the Korean War,” he wrote. “Based in Japan, our night-fighter squadron flew missions over the Sea of Japan at the intriguing confluence of Korea, China and Russia.”

After his return from Korea, Lunt’s parents sold the Wheatland ranch, and he looked for other ranching opportunities. He met the Belgian woman who became his wife, Beatrice, and his father-in-law became interested in a Cuban investment. Lunt wrote that his father-in-law helped with the 1956 purchase of the ranch property and it was in his father-in-law’s name.

The family grew with the birth of two sons, Anthony and Michael, in Cuba and Larry, the youngest, in 1961 in Belgium.

Articles in newspapers in 1957, including the Sheridan Press on April 30, reported that Lunt, “son of a Wyoming cattleman,” had been arrested by a guard at President Fulgencio Batista’s Varadero Beach residence.

“Lunt was driving his car, accompanied by his wife and the son and daughter of Brazil’s ambassador to Cuba, when he was stopped by a corporal on guard duty,” the Associated Press reported. “After a heated argument, the guard slapped Lunt in the mouth and threatened the party with his machine gun. Lunt was taken into custody and released a short time later.”

Larry Lunt said he did not know about that story, but a Washington Post article on Sept. 21, 1979, following his father’s release and posted on the CIA.gov website, stated that Lunt said he supported Castro guerillas in the final days of the Batista regime.

“When Castro later ordered hundreds of executions in 1960, Lunt suspected he had bet on the wrong horse,” the reporter wrote.

Larry Lunt said his understanding is after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, his dad was recruited by the CIA because of the ranch, which was officially a Belgian ranch. Castro at that time still had good relations with European countries.

The son said he spoke with his dad many times about his time working for the CIA. His father said he was asked to help get photos of Soviet activities at missile sites, of trucks carrying missiles, and of Soviet activity in the countryside.

Boots On The Ground


Later news stories talked about him keeping track of missiles he found hidden in Cuban caves.

“At that time there was no satellite, no internet, none of these things,” Larry Lunt said. “So, they were really relying on boots on the ground for information and that’s what my father was.”

In his book “Leave Me My Spirit,” Lawrence Lunt wrote that his tactics orchestrated by the CIA included the establishment of cells that involved recruiting a foreman in construction, someone in the restaurant syndicate, a naval officer, a man with knowledge of Castro regime’s protocol and another in the Cuban foreign office.

“Later (there was) coordination of airdrops, arms, and explosives, counterfeit pesos, medicines and on one memorable occasion, the hysterical (girlfriend) of an anti-Castro guerilla chief,” he wrote.

In May 1965, as Lawrence Lunt attempted to board a flight out of the country, he was told he could not leave. Attempts to contact various officials got him nowhere. He went to an apartment in Havana that he kept and destroyed some contact documents he had hidden in masonry. He left the apartment and later that night returned and was arrested by secret police.

The interrogations, threats, and 14 years of incarceration began.

Larry Lunt, who was 3 when his dad was arrested, said soldiers came to the ranch and stayed until a few months later when they were allowed to leave and go to Belgium, where they lived with his mother’s parents — the initial anticipation was that his father might be in prison for a year or so.

“But it ended up being close to 15 years,” he said. “So, we ended up just living with my grandparents and growing up there.”

Sleep Deprivation


In his book, Lawrence Lunt wrote about efforts by regime authorities to use sleep deprivation, threats and accusations to break him and share information about his activities. Food rations were meager.

He wrote that he volunteered for espionage out of patriotism and a youthful thought that the “spy trade was a fast lane to glamour, a chance to live on the edge rather than ease through life as an observer.”

“My own decision, my own life, no arm twisting,” he wrote. “At any time, I might have cried quits. I didn’t.”

The book alludes to time spent in training at a CIA “safe house” in Arlington, Virginia, where part of the course involved dealing with one’s own behavior under cross examination. He wrote that he tried to apply that knowledge during his initial interrogations.

Larry Lunt said a story from the family that he heard was that after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, his father had housed a Cuban who participated in the invasion, and escaped Castro’s men, in a small cabin on the ranch. When his mother found out about it, she told him he had to send the man away because she was scared.

The man left the ranch and was eventually captured by the Cubans and ended up telling authorities where he had stayed, Larry Lunt said.

“He was the one that told the Cubans that my father had been helping him,” he said. “They caught him from that.”

Family Visits


During the 14 years of his father’s imprisonment, Larry Lunt said his mother traveled to Cuba and saw him three times and he recalls going twice. He said the authorities would make sure to present his dad in the best light possible.

“There were rough times and then there were better times,” he said. “He went to a lot of different prisons … They made sure that he looked good and they would feed him better and dress him up and all this a month or two months before we arrived.”

In an interview with the Washington Post published Sept. 21, 1979, Lawrence Lunt spoke of bread and milk for breakfast, maggots in the cornmeal mush for lunch and soup for dinner. He said prisoners learned to smuggle magazines by taping them to their bodies.

And once during work at a rock quarry, a Cuban guard knocked him to the ground with the butt of a bayonet. When another prisoner tried to help, he was shot. Lawrence Lunt told the Post reporter that the prisoner lived.

A memo found on the CIA.gov website on National Security Council stationery to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dated Jan. 23, 1975, states that the Lunt family through their attorney John T. Wainwright was pressuring the administration to do something to see Lunt released.

The memo noted that the Cubans had been willing to exchange Lawrence Lunt for a Cuban prisoner in Portugal but changed their mind after that nation’s government changed.

“Within the last week the Cuban government has informed us through the Belgian government that it would agree to release Lunt if Lolita Lebron were released from the federal penitentiary in Alderson, West Virginia,” the memo from Stephen Low, a U.S. State Department analyst stated. “Lebron was a member of a Puerto Rican group which attacked and wounded a number of U.S. Congressmen on the floor of the House in 1954.”

The memo reported that Lebron had been sentenced to 16 to 50 years in prison and was eligible for parole, but she refused to apply unless other Puerto Ricans arrested with her were released and she was granted amnesty.

The Release


In the end, the deal did not happen, and it wasn’t until 1979 in the Carter administration that hope appeared on the horizon.

Wyoming Gov. Ed Herschler told the Associated Press in an article published in the University of Wyoming Branding Iron on Sept. 19, 1979, that he along with U.S. Reps. Benjamin A. Gilman, R-N.Y., and Mickey Leland, D-Texas, had been working on the swap of four Puerto Rican prisoners for four Cuban political prisoners, including Lunt, for more than a year.

Herschler said his efforts were prompted by advocacy from Dr. John Lunt, Lunt’s brother, who had arrived in the state and purchased a ranch in Saratoga in 1977.

The paper noted that Lawrence Lunt had been a rancher in the state prior to moving to Cuba.

The New York Times announced Lunt’s and the others’ release with a front-page story on Sept. 19, 1979, with the U.S. State Department denying any “deal” had been cut.

“Cuba Frees Last 4 From U.S. Detained in Political Cases,” the headline read. “Action Follows Carter’s Release of 4 Jailed Puerto Ricans — State Department Denies Deal.”

“I am deeply, emotionally happy,” Lunt was quoted in the paper, as it inaccurately described him as a “rancher born in Wyoming.”

Lunt told the gathered reporters that he and others released were “considered by the Cubans as merchandise to be exchanged at a convenient time.”

In his interview with the Washington Post on Sept. 21, 1979, Lunt said he was not bitter for the 14 years of his life under Communist imprisonment.

‘No Regrets’


“I have no regrets for what I did,” he told the paper. “My love of country and all it stands for has been a sustaining factor in keeping the bitterness out of my heart, the feeling of being an American and all it entails.”

Lawrence Lunt, then 55, told the paper he did regret missing seeing his wife and sons and the “maturation” of his boys.

Larry Lunt said when his father was released his two oldest sons were already living their own lives and he was finishing college.

“He moved to Belgium, lived with us, but I was in college and was nearly out,” he said. “But he stayed living with my mother and my grandparents, and then they bought a home in Tucson, Arizona. So, he was spending a lot of time in the U.S. between Saratoga, where his brother was, Tucson and in Belgium.”

Larry Lunt said among those in Washington, D.C., waiting to welcome his dad back to the states was Wyoming Rep. Dick Cheney.

Newspapers reported nearly seven years later that Cheney sponsored legislation to provide Lawrence Lunt with pay for his time held in captivity.

Cheney advocated for $600,000 in federal compensation, according to a Casper Star-Tribune article on Aug. 11, 1986. Cheney said the CIA determined it could not pay Lawrence Lunt from its funds but supported his bill. The Star-Tribune reported on Oct. 10, 1986, that Cheney’s bill passed.

But Larry Lunt said his understanding was that when the money arrived for his father, it was $250,000.

Larry Lunt said his father loved to write and spent 10 years working on his book before it was published by the Affiliated Writers of America in 1990. He also wrote several other things that were never published.

One of his greatest loves was spending two months or so a year with his brother Dr. John Lunt at his Highline Ranch in Saratoga.

“Horseback riding, herding cows and walking on the grasslands of the West — that area was really his happy place,” Larry Lunt said. “He spent a few months a year in Wyoming, regularly visiting his brother on his ranch and just hanging out there.”

Lawrence Lunt died on April 30, 2017, in Tucson. He was 92.

Contact Dale Killingbeck at dale@cowboystatedaily.com

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.