Florida State University worker killed in shooting was son of slain anti-Castro CIA operative

One of the two people killed in Thursday’s shootings at Florida State University was the son of Ricardo “Monkey” Morales, a shadowy Cuban-American CIA operative and anti-Castro militant throughut the 1960s and ’70s who died in a bar fight in Miami in 1982.

Roberto Morales, 57, was among several university employees who had gathered for a meeting when the shooting began, his brother, Ricardo Morales Jr. said. He worked at the university’s department of dining services.

“Today we lost my younger brother, He was one of the victims killed at FSU. He loved his job at FSU and his beautiful Wife and Daughter. I’m glad you were in my Life,” Ricardo Morales Jr. wrote Thursday night in his X account.

Roberto Morales was one of two people, neither of whom were FSU students, who were killed. Five others were hospitalized in the shootings, which began shortly before noon. Authorities said the shooter, who is in custody, is the son of a Leon County Schools deputy and had used one of her weapons.

Roberto Morales had been deeply affected by his father’s death while he was a teenager, his brother said. His father, who had been a central figure in Cold War-era espionage and anti-Castro militancy, was killed in a Key Biscayne bar on December 20, 1982, during a fight. He was 43. Police ruled the incident a justifiable homicide, though his controversial past has long fueled speculation about the true nature of his death.

“Monkey” Morales operated in the shadowy realms of intelligence and counterintelligence for multiple agencies — including the CIA, FBI, DEA, the Israeli Mossad and Venezuela’s DISIP. His legacy is marked by covert operations, bombings and alleged ties to drug trafficking. Despite numerous brushes with the law, he was frequently shielded from prosecution, feeding theories about his connections to high-level covert U.S. operations.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Morales, who took part in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, was one of many Cuban exiles collaborating with the CIA to undermine Fidel Castro’s regime.

In a 2021 radio interview in Miami, Ricardo Morales Jr. claimed that his father had ties to Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

Morales said his father, who served as a sniper instructor in the early 1960s at secret camps where Cuban exiles and others were trained for missions against Cuba, recognized Oswald as one of his former trainees in the hours following Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in 1963.