46 years, a missing father, no answers

Sherry Sullivan, a Maine woman who last saw her father in 1963 at age seven, won a lawsuit against the Cuban government for her father’s wrongful death. A Maine Superior Court judge awarded $21 million in damages, plus interest, ostensibly to be collected from the Cuban government. The Bangor Daily News report is here.

There’s a lot to this case that’s hard to figure out, not the least of which is the issue of evidence about the exact fate of the father, Geoffrey Sullivan, a pilot. (The judge’s decision doesn’t seem to be available on-line.) If you search for information about Geoffrey Sullivan, there’s no definitive account of his fate – something that his daughter, who has searched assiduously for years, is the first to admit.

This story quotes Ms. Sullivan’s lawsuit saying that her father and an associate, Alexander Rorke, “participated in various anti-Castro covert operations in Central America and Cuba” before they disappeared in October 1963 after taking off from Cozumel, Mexico. The story adds: “The suit says those activities may have included sabotage and subversion. It cites evidence that Sullivan was imprisoned after being shot down during a covert mission in Cuba.”

This 1993 court decision, which upheld the CIA’s rejection of an information request from Ms. Sullivan, said that she had “surmised that Rorke and her father were engaged in a CIA-sponsored mission to drop propaganda (or perhaps something more sinister) over Cuba. Despite appellant’s suspicions, the CIA steadfastly refused to acknowledge that it employed either man at any time.”

This report’s section on Americans “killed or missing in operations to monitor or counter the Castro regime” says that in April 1963, Rorke and Sullivan “had bombed an oil refinery in Havana, Cuba with homemade bombs, but the bombs had failed to explode.”

More information on the case is here and here.

Cuba’s position in this and similar lawsuits seems to be to decline to respond in any way. One wonders what would have happened if Cuba had responded to the judge in Maine that Sullivan was captured and tried, if that was the case, on charges related to his flights and whatever he may have been dropping over Cuba.

One also wonders, for his daughter’s sake, why the U.S. government, after all these years, can’t answer her questions by saying whether her father was working for the CIA or another agency, and what it knows about his mission in October 1963, and his fate.