the Communist cause, in 1966 Ilich was reported to have been a budding revolutionary under the guidance of no less than Fidel Castro and the KGB. According to claims made in various publications over the years, young Ilich was sent to a Cuban indoctrination camp by his father to study sabotage techniques and other terrorist activities. The camp in question was called Camp Mantanzas and was run by Castro's Direccion General de Inteligencia (DGI) and Castro's KGB adviser, Viktor Semenov.The stories suggest that Ilich was a prize student at the camp and was personally tutored by Antonio Dagues-Bouvier, an Ecuadorian guerrilla warfare expert and a senior KGB officer, in the use of explosives, automatic weapons, mines, encryption and false documents. Another story tells of his meeting with the notorious Father Camillo Torres, a Colombian priest who became a guerrilla leader under Che Guevara.Whether he received training from the Cubans is still a point of contention but two episodes seem highly unlikely. The first is that he could not have met Father Torres in Cuba because soldiers of the Colombian army had killed the priest in Colombia in February 1966. In addition, General Semenov did not become the head of the KGB in Cuba until 1968, some two years after Ilich was supposedly trained there.These and other stories regarding Ilich's training were apparently circulated by the CIA based on information supplied by Orlando Castro Hidalgo, a former member of the DGI who defected from the Cuban embassy in Paris. He supposedly told the CIA that Ilich was one of the many Venezuelans that received terrorist training in Cuba. In recent years a former head of the counter-terrorism department of the CIA has given evidence admitting that the CIA had no evidence to support the claim. What has been confirmed is that in August 1966, Elba took Ilich and his brothers to London to continue they're schooling. After the family settled in West London, Il...
