with US intelligence
PAUL HAVEN Associated Press
2:53 p.m. EDT, April 5, 2011
HAVANA (AP) — The Reuters news agency on Tuesday vehemently denied an
accusation made on Cuban state television that one of its journalists
helped arrange a meeting between an undercover Cuban agent and a U.S.
diplomat who the program described as a CIA operative.
The allegations against former Reuters bureau chief Anthony Boadle were
made on a Monday evening program called "Cuba's Reasons," which featured
a previously little-known dissident named Raul Capote who said he was in
fact "Agent Daniel," working for Cuban intelligence.
There was no way to independently establish the veracity of the
accusation. The show, dedicated to uncovering plots against Cuba, is
shot in the style of a real-crime drama, with a mix of grainy secret
footage, tense music and stylized dramatizations.
Watch this now: Three more sets of remains discovered near NY beach.
"Reuters refutes the allegations of the report, and stands firmly on its
160 years of accurate and unbiased reporting in Cuba and around the
world," said Erin Kurtz, a spokesperson for Thomson Reuters, in a
statement sent to The Associated Press on Tuesday.
While Cuba's official media often denounce the foreign press as being
biased, it is unusual for it to make such a serious accusation, and it
gave ambiguous evidence to back it up.
On the program, Capote says that he was invited by Boadle to attend a
reception at the German Embassy, without giving a date. The two left the
party by foot after two hours and walked through the dark Havana night,
he said.
"We walked I don't know how many blocks, until we arrived at a dark
place where a car was parked. There was a shadow inside, a man," Capote
said. He said it was Mark Sullivan, who worked at the U.S. diplomatic
mission in Havana from 2006-2008.
Capote says he did not know Sullivan at the time, but that he later
revealed himself to be a CIA agent.
He said that at some point after the meeting with Sullivan, he began
working with the CIA himself, though he was in fact a double agent. U.S.
officials he took to be intelligence agents asked him his opinion on
Cuban politics and eventually gave him a code name and satellite phone
to use to communicate, he said.
Gloria Berbena, a spokeswoman at the American diplomatic mission, had no
comment.
The program showed a picture of Boadle and accused him of serving as a
"liaison" between Capote and the CIA. It gave no evidence other than
Capote's account, nor did it mention any other alleged rendezvous
involving Boadle during his roughly six years in Cuba.
It also accused Boadle of lacking journalistic balance, saying that
during his "stay in Cuba from March 2002 through 2008 he published
reports favoring local counterrevolutionaries and the interests of the
United States and the European Union."
Phil Peters, a Cuba expert who is vice president of the Arlington,
Virginia-based Lexington Institute think tank, said the accusation that
Boadle was helping set up intelligence meetings went much farther than
Cuba's usual complaints against what it considers biased foreign media
coverage.
"It's one thing that they would yank a journalist's chain over their
coverage ... but the allegation that a journalist is working for a
foreign government is a completely different type of charge," he said.
Cuba has kept up an unusually strong stream of criticism of the foreign
press in recent months.
In February, the Communist Party newspaper Granma carried an article
denouncing The Wall Street Journal for an editorial that drew parallels
between Cuba and Egypt, where a popular uprising forced former President
Hosni Mubarak to step down.
The editorial was published days after Cuban media lashed out at CNN's
Spanish-language channel for reporting that an opposition demonstration
was going to take place in Havana. The protest never occurred.
Cuban state cable TV providers in January removed CNN's Spanish service
from a package of channels provided mostly to hotels, foreign companies
and diplomats on the island, though no reason was given.
No comments:
Post a Comment