Why the U.S. Should Be Wary of Cuba

Why the U.S. Should Be Wary of Cuba
Analysis JULY 14, 2015 | 09:30 GMT
By Fred Burton

Editor's Note: The following piece is part of an occasional series in
which Fred Burton, our vice president of intelligence, reflects on his
storied experience as a counterterrorism agent for the U.S. State
Department.

After decades of hostility, the United States and Cuba finally seem to
be reconciling. On July 1, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that
Washington will reopen its embassy in Havana. For the first time since
1961, when the two countries severed ties, U.S. diplomats and staff will
fill the embassy and the surrounding city streets, as will a U.S. Marine
detachment working security detail.

But even as the embassy in Havana now stands as a monument to improved
U.S.-Cuban relations, it will make the United States much more
vulnerable to monitoring and infiltration by Cuban intelligence
agencies. And today foreign spies pose as real and immediate a threat to
U.S. interests as they did during the Cold War.

A History of Espionage

In the 1970s and 1980s, counterterrorism agents like myself witnessed
the United States gear its entire national security apparatus toward
countering Soviet influence. Looking back, I believe our fixation on the
Soviet Union actually caused us to underestimate other countries'
agencies. We believed Cuba's Directorate of Intelligence, trained by
Moscow though it may have been, was significantly less effective than
Russia's KGB.

Indeed, our preoccupation with the Soviet Union blinded us to the fact
that Cuba quietly operated assets inside the United States. Among the
many spies they recruited were Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn
Steingraber Myers. When the Cubans first recruited the Myerses in 1979,
Kendall Myers was a part-time instructor at the State Department's
Foreign Service Institute, where U.S. diplomats and other professionals
train before they receive their overseas assignments. He later became a
senior analyst at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). From my
own time in the intelligence business, I know that INR analysts have
access to highly classified information from virtually every government
agency — and since Myers was working for Havana, so, too, did Cuban
intelligence.

The Myerses were finally discovered and put on trial in 2006. But as we
would learn four years after the trial, the Cubans had someone with even
more insight into the United States' national security apparatus: Ana
Montes, a double agent who worked as an analyst at the Defense
Intelligence Agency. Cuban intelligence turned her in 1985, and she
passed classified information to Havana for years thereafter.

In the 1980s, when Montes was spying for Cuba, I worked in the
burgeoning counterterrorism arm of the Department of State's Diplomatic
Security Service. I was far more concerned with Libya and Iran than with
Cuba, since so many of my cases involved Soviet actors and KGB agents.
Like the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, I saw the Soviet Union
as the primary threat. But all along, despite all our efforts to defend
U.S. intelligence and assets, our national security agencies were being
repeatedly infiltrated by Cuban intelligence.

Hidden Threats

Now, with the U.S. Embassy opening in Havana, Cuba will monitor and
attempt to recruit U.S. employees as actively as it did during the Cold
War. Cuban intelligence will build case files on every American official
who travels in country. It will surveil diplomatic staffers as it looks
for potential recruits and as it tries to identify U.S. agents.

Cuban intelligence will do so using techniques new and old alike. In the
past, the Cuban Directorate of Intelligence employed tactics it learned
from the Soviet KGB to collect information and communicate with its
operatives. Spies such as Myers and Montes received encrypted radio
messages from their Cuban handlers and passed information using dead
drops, in which agents leave information at a secret location, and brush
passes, in which they physically hand over material in a brief encounter.

Havana will also likely plant listening devices in hotel rooms, taxis
and rental cars to monitor on the U.S. diplomatic mission. Operatives
will take photographs of the embassy staff as they come and go, locate
employees' homes and even plan honeypots and male raven operations,
during which an undercover agent acts like a love interest to collect
intelligence. In short, with a reopening embassy, the Cubans will have
ample opportunity to undermine U.S. national security.

U.S. intelligence agencies are well aware of the Cuban threat. As the
embassy opens in Havana, CIA and FBI agents will constantly be briefing
State Department staff on situational awareness and counterintelligence.
Those who are unaware of long history of espionage may call the
countless warnings excessive and deem Washington's intelligence
community over-cautious. But the threat is real, regardless of whether
embassy workers heed the warnings. As those in the intelligence business
often say, the Cold War, in a sense, never really ended. Foreign policy
can change at a moment's notice. Strategic alliances never mean absolute
trust. And in a world full of hidden threats, there is no such thing as
a friendly intelligence service.

Source: Why the U.S. Should Be Wary of Cuba | Stratfor -
https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/why-us-should-be-wary-cuba