In the last few months, two major Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) releases have landed: Harold Derber’s long-withheld FBI file and the CIA-screened portion of his 2,400-page USCIS immigration dossier. Together, they shed new light on his refugee-ferrying schemes and his early Cold War gun-running ventures. Below is a summary of the most significant revelations.

CIA portion of Derber’s USCIS file

I previously obtained Harold Derber’s USCIS file through a FOIA request. Roughly one quarter of the file was withheld and redirected for review by other agencies, including the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, the Department of Justice, the CIA, and others. Nearly two years after my request, the section withheld by the CIA has finally been released.

Most of this material details U.S. government surveillance of Derber’s scheme to ferry refugees from Cuba to the United States, an operation that defied the State Department and arguably violated the trade embargo. After making a trial run smuggling 23 Cuban refugees into the U.S., Derber was deported as a national security risk.

The new CIA documents add a critical layer: Fidel Castro was directly involved in Derber’s refugee mission. One CIA cable dated April 23, 1965 states:

“Harold Derber of Empress Lines, Ltd., is visiting Cuba at the invitation of Raul Castro. Fidel Castro has asked Derber to present as soon as possible a plan for transporting by ship a large number of Cuban emigrants… Fidel considers the whole matter so urgent that he has persuaded Carlos Varona, Head of the emigration department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, to postpone his honeymoon.

Derber was to coordinate the ferry operation from England with the help of Braulio Martinez, a Cuban intelligence (Dirección de Inteligencia) officer. Derber claimed the Cuban government had extended him a $1 million line of credit (roughly $10 million today) at a London bank to finance the scheme. A CIA source suggested the money likely came through Moscow Narodny Bank of London, a Soviet-linked institution.

This newly surfaced material underscores that Castro personally green-lit and funded Derber’s ferry program, even after Derber had been deported from the United States and had relocated to England.

Notably absent from this release is anything relating to Derber’s later criminal and espionage activity. That information is almost certainly contained in his still-classified CIA operational file, which the Agency informs me they’ll release in late 2026. I’ll share those findings when they arrive. His NSA file remains fully withheld.

DerbeR’s FBI File

Derber’s newly released FBI file contains several explosive revelations about his early arms-smuggling operations.

Illegal arms procurement for Trujillo

One of the most striking disclosures concerns Derber’s efforts in spring 1959 to secure a multimillion-dollar weapons package for Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

The Dominican government reportedly extended Derber $41 million in lines of credit—equivalent to roughly $456 million today—at London banks to acquire the arms. A review I conducted at the UK National Archives at Kew confirms that the Dominican Republic placed credit lines in London during this period for freelance brokers seeking weapons.

The proposed shopping list included rifles, grenades, rockets, and even jet-fighter bombers.

Derber’s arms procurement program was in the lead-up to the arms embargo against the DR imposed by the United States and formalized on August 20, 1959, as part of a resolution by the Organisation of American States (OAS). This embargo was in response to the Trujillo regime’s attacks on Caribbean neighbors and ongoing repression. It’s unclear if Derber was successful in securing these arms for the DR.

Whitewashing German Arms sales Through Israel

Another revelation is that, in early 1960, Derber attempted to route West German and Belgian arms through Israel to obscure both their origin and their final destination in the Dominican Republic. Derber already had a long relationship with Israel, having secretly served as a ship’s captain during the 1948 Arab-Israeli Way and remaining in the region after the armistice.

Since West Germany and its NATO partners imposed strict export-control regulations on arms shipments from Germany following the war, rerouting the weapons through an Israeli intermediary would have offered a political deniability. Notably, West Germany would begin a major covert arms-transfer program to Israel only a few years later, despite the export ban. Derber’s attempt to channel weapons through Israel may therefore hint at clandestine export channels that pre-dated the officially acknowledged program, or at least formed part of its lead-up.

Missing Years

While the FBI file illuminates Derber’s early gun-running years, it provides almost nothing about his later criminal career, particularly his 1970s money-laundering operations for the Gambino crime family and his guns-for-drugs trade with Cuba and Colombia. Those gaps are likely in the files still withheld by the DOJ and NSA. The DEA destroyed its file on Harold Derber as well as the files on the secret operation to intercept his drug boats.