BY WILFREDO CANCIO ISLA

Juanita Castro was recruited by the CIA in 1961 through her friend Virginia Leitao de Cunha, wife of the Brazilian ambassador in Havana, but refused to conspire in any attempts on the lives of her brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro.

According to Juanita's revelations in her book, Fidel y Raúl, mis hermanos. La historia secreta -- Fidel and Raúl, My Brothers. The Secret History -- which hit the book stores Monday, Virginia Leitao called her to a meeting at the Brazilian ambassador's residence in Havana and proposed she collaborate with "some friends who know of your [anti-government] work and want to help you."

The meeting took place shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961, and Juanita would quickly begin operating inside Cuba as agent "Donna." For almost three years she protected in her home several opponents of her brothers' revolution.

The 432-page book was written in collaboration with Mexican journalist María Antonieta Collins and published by Santillana USA.

It was the first time that Juanita has directly confirmed her links to the CIA, although they have been mentioned in public in the past.

Shortly after she went into exile in 1964, The Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans published an Associated Press story under the headline "Juanita Castro informed the CIA; Handed over informations during four years in Cuba."

In 1975, renegade CIA agent Phillip Agee branded her as a CIA "propaganda agent'' in his book Inside the Company.

And in 2005, one of the CIA's top Cuba officials in the 1960s, Ted Shackley, wrote in his book Spymaster, My Life in the CIA that the agency had been in contact with Juanita in Havana through Virginia Leitao de Cunha.

Juanita's book says she first met with a CIA official at the Camino Real Hotel in Mexico City June 24, 1961. He called himself Enrique but his real name was Tony Sforza, a CIA man who had lived in Cuba as a gambler under the name of Frank Stevens. He later played a key role in Operation Mongoose, an ambitious program of economic sabotage and armed attacks against Cuba ordered by the Kennedy administration after the Bay of Pigs failure.

Juanita agreed to work with the CIA on condition that she would not participate in any violent activities against her brothers or other government officials, and refused to accept any money for her work, according to the book.

Her first mission came a week later, when she returned to Havana with some cans of food that in reality contained documents, messages and money for CIA agents and other anti-Castro conspirators on the island.

The book also says that even before the Cuban missile crisis in October of 1962 Juanita had passed the CIA information about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

When Virginia asks her about rumors of the arrival of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, the book says, Juanita replied, "It's not a secret that they are doing something at least in Sagua la Grande, Guanajay and San Cristóbal." U.S. surveillance planes eventually detected the missiles in San Cristóbal, in the province of Pinar del Rio.

Juanita decided to leave Cuba after Raúl Castro showed her a thick Cuban intelligence file on her activities against the revolution and told her that Fidel was angry, the book said. It does not mention if the file included information on her links with the CIA.