Will spy wars between Cuba and the U.S. end with restored relations?

Will spy wars between Cuba and the U.S. end with restored relations?

Since Fidel Castro seized power in January 1959, and over the next five
decades, Havana built one of the world's most active intelligence services
Some of the biggest crises in U.S.-Cuba relations can be traced to the
involvement of Cuban spies and agents
Cuban espionage against the United States intensified in the 1980s when
President Ronald Reagan stepped up rhetoric against Cuba at the height
of the Cold War
ALFONSO CHARDY
achardy@elnuevoherald.com

Though the United States has restored relations with Cuba, and President
Barack Obama is planning to visit the island later this month, it's
unclear if the two countries have declared a truce in the spy wars they
have waged for more than 50 years.

Lawmakers in Congress have warned the Obama administration that allowing
Cuba to operate an embassy in Washington and consulates throughout the
country will only make it easier for Havana to deploy spies and agents
in the United States.

"We are all too familiar with the Castro regime's efforts to utilize
their diplomats as intelligence agents tasked with the goal of
committing espionage against the host countries,'' according to a letter
sent in 2015 to the U.S. Department of State by five Cuban-American
lawmakers including Miami Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Mario Diaz-Balart
and Carlos Curbelo, as well as presidential candidate and Texas Senator
Ted Cruz, and New Jersey Rep. Albio Sires, D-N.J.

Since Fidel Castro seized power in January 1959, and over the next five
decades, Havana built one of the world's most active intelligence
services — one that dispatched spies and agents to penetrate the highest
levels of the American government and some of the leading Cuban exile
organizations.

In fact, some of the biggest crises in U.S.-Cuba relations can be traced
to the involvement of Cuban spies and agents — from the downing of two
Brothers to the Rescue planes to the theft of U.S. military secrets at
the Defense Intelligence Agency and the spying of U.S. military
facilities in South Florida and infiltration of leading Cuban exile
organizations in Miami by members of the now-defunct Wasp Network.

I BELIEVE THE MAIN REASON THAT CUBAN INTELLIGENCE WAS SO EXCEPTIONALLY
SUCCESSFUL, FOR SO MANY YEARS, IS BECAUSE THE SUPREME CUBAN SPY MASTER
WAS FIDEL CASTRO HIMSELF
Brian Latell, former CIA official

"I believe the main reason that Cuban intelligence was so exceptionally
successful, for so many years, is because the supreme Cuban spy master
was Fidel Castro himself," said Brian Latell, a former CIA official who
in 2012 published the landmark book Castro's Secrets: Cuban
Intelligence, the CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, which
provides an authoritative history of Cuban espionage against the United
States. "Intelligence operations were always among his highest priorities."

While some Cuban spies have become well known — such as the five illegal
intelligence officers caught, tried and convicted for belonging to the
Wasp Network that spied on military facilities in South Florida and
infiltrated the ranks of exile groups — other agents have operated in
obscurity. Still others have only been suspected — but never confirmed —
as Cuban agents, including Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President
John F. Kennedy.

Oswald is perhaps a good place to start. If it's true he was a Cuban
agent, then Oswald was one of the first to operate clandestinely in the
United States.

There's never been any concrete evidence that Oswald was controlled by
Cuban intelligence, but Latell's authoritative book offers tantalizing
information indicating that the American assassin had been in contact
with Cuban officials well before his well-documented bus trip to Mexico
City, two months before the Dallas assassination, where he visited the
Cuban consulate seeking a visa to Havana and yelled that he would kill
Kennedy after he was denied travel papers.

Latell's book quotes from testimony before the Warren Commission that
investigated the 1963 assassination that sometime in 1959, the year
Castro seized power in Havana, Oswald contacted Cuban officials —
possibly in Los Angeles — and remained in touch while he was stationed
at the former U.S. Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in southern California.

Nelson Delgado, a Puerto Rican Marine who became a friend of Oswald's,
recalled in testimony that Oswald himself told him he was in contact
with Cuban diplomats and that he was receiving mail from them.

Delgado also told the Warren Commission that once he saw an envelope
stamped with a Cuban government seal in Oswald's quarters and that
Oswald regularly received an unknown civilian visitor at the base.

More significantly, Latell says in his book, Cuban officials — perhaps
even Castro himself — knew in advance that something was going to happen
in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 because they ordered a young intelligence
communications officer to stop tracking CIA signals that day and instead
focus on broadcasts from Texas.

The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone, and the House
Select Committee on Assassinatuons in 1976 said the Cuban government was
not involved in the Kennedy assassination. Oswald was killed by Dallas
nightclub owner Jack Ruby soon after the assassin's arrest.

Incidentally, the communications officer ordered to track Texas
broadcasts was Florentino Aspillaga Lombard, one of the most important
Cuban intelligence defectors ever to have fled to the United States. He
defected in 1987 and was targeted for assassination in 1997 by suspected
members of the Miami-based Wasp Network, according to Latell's book.

Almost every decade, U.S. authorities have uncovered Cuban espionage or
terrorist plots within the United States.

One of the first confirmed espionage and sabotage attempts took place in
1962 — just after the Cuban missile crisis ended.

FBI agents thwarted the alleged Castro plot that involved setting off
explosives at various department stores in New York City as well as oil
refineries in New Jersey, according to a New York Times article
published on Nov. 19, 1962.

Three of the suspects — Roberto Santiesteban Casanova, José Gómez Abad
and his wife Elisa Montero de Gómez Abad — were attached to the Cuban
mission to the United Nations. Though Cuba denied the diplomats'
involvement in the plot, a year later Santiesteban was freed and allowed
to return to Cuba as part of an exchange for Americans held on the
island. The Abads had been freed and kicked out by the State Department
soon after their arrest.

In the 1970s, U.S. intelligence officials suspected that Cuban spies
helped finance the activities of U.S. anti-government militant groups
such as the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army.

In fact, one of the best known black militants from that era, Assata
Shakur or JoAnne Chesimard fled to Cuba in 1984 after escaping from
prison. Chesimard is still in Cuba.

In 1978, Walter Kendall Myers, then a young State Department contract
employee, visited Cuba and was recruited as agent 202. His wife
Gwendolyn became agent 123. Eventually, Myers climbed in the ranks of
the State Department to become a State Department intelligence analyst.
For three decades, the couple relayed secret information to their Cuban
control officers via shortwave radio and encrypted electronic messages.
Gwendolyn was in charge of transmitting the secrets to Cuba.

Cuban espionage against the United States intensified in the 1980s when
President Ronald Reagan stepped up rhetoric against Cuba at the height
of the Cold War.

It was then that Cuban intelligence recruited Ana Belen Montes, daughter
of a Puerto Rican family who in 1985 joined the ranks of the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA). By the time Montes was arrested in 2001, she
had already become a senior DIA analyst and had passed a considerable
amount of American secrets to Cuba. Montes pleaded guilty in 2002 and
was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Also in 2002, U.S. investigators learned that Montes had been recruited
as a Cuban agent by a fellow student, Marta Rita Velazquez, at Johns
Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in
Washington, who later worked for the State Department. Velazquez has
since been indicted but not prosecuted because she lives in Sweden,
which does not allow extradition for spying.

In the 1990s, Cuban espionage within the United States intensified
further after exiles began a series of anti-Castro raids and sabotage
missions against the island in the belief that the fall of Communism in
eastern Europe would hasten the downfall of the Castro regime.

It was then that Cuba sent intelligence officers to South Florida who
gradually built the Wasp Network of spies, one of the most elaborate
foreign espionage systems ever discovered in the United States.

Wasp Network members ultimately managed to infiltrate Brothers to the
Rescue, Alpha 66 and other exile groups and also spied on U.S. military
facilities in South Florida. While the group was discovered in 1998, its
members had been active for years. For example, the network's
information helped the Cuban government down two small planes belonging
to Brothers to the Rescue in which four Cuban exiles were killed in 1996.

The victims of the shootdown that involved two Cuban MiGs, were Carlos
Costa, Armando Alejandre, Jr., Mario de la Peñma and Pablo Morales.

"One of the most painful moments was to hear the tape of the pilots
seeking orders to shoot down the small planes and how they rejoiced when
they announced that they had shot them down," said Maggie Alejandre
Khuly, sister of Armando Alejandre. "I went to the trial every day and
in order to bear the pain I wrote a lot. That way I was able to distance
myself from what was happening, the lies and the surprises, the horrors
which until that moment had been unexpected."

Alejandre Khuly said the victims' families felt vindicated when the
sentences were announced against the spies.

"Of course, everything changed on December 17, 2014, and we don't know
exactly how we are going to continue fighting, but we will. We will not
forget Carlos, Armando, Mario and Pablo."

The families now hope that eventually the MiG pilots — twin brothers
Lorenzo Alberto Perez Perez and Francisco Perez Perez — and then Cuban
air force chief Gen. Ruben Martinez Puente — will be brought to trial in
the United States. A U.S. grand jury in Miami indicted the pilots and
Gen. Martinez Puente in 2003 for the shootdown.

Though more than two dozen people worked in the Wasp network, in the end
only five leaders were prosecuted and convicted in Miami: Antonio
Guerrero, René González, Fernando González, Gerardo Hernández and Ramón
Labañino.

René González was released from prison in 2011 and allowed to return to
Cuba in 2013. Fernando González was released on Feb. 27, 2014 and the
remaining three were freed and returned to Cuba on Dec. 17, 2014 — the
day President Obama ordered the restoration of relations with Cuba.

While U.S. authorities succeeded in dismantling the Wasp Network, Cuban
espionage continued.

In 2002, four Cuban diplomats were expelled for activities deemed
harmful to the United States. One of them was Gustavo Machín Gómez who
joined the Cuban negotiation team on restoration of relations and was
received at the State Department in February 2015, according to the
letter released by the U.S. lawmakers.

In 2003, 14 more Cuban diplomats were kicked out including José Anselmo
López Perera, husband of Josefina Vidal, who headed the Cuban team that
brought about restoration of relations.

IN 2003, 14 CUBAN DIPLOMATS WERE KICKED OUT INCLUDING JOSÉ ANSELMO LÓPEZ
PERERA, HUSBAND OF JOSEFINA VIDAL, WHO HEADED THE CUBAN TEAM THAT
BROUGHT ABOUT RESTORATION OF RELATIONS.

In 2006, Florida International University professors Carlos and Elsa
Alvarez were arrested and later pleaded guilty in connection with a
Cuban espionage case. In 2007, Carlos was sentenced to five years in
prison, and Elsa to three years.

The last big case emerged in 2009, when agents announced the discovery
of the Myers espionage couple. In 2010, Walter — then 73 — was sentenced
to life in prison and his wife, then 72, to 81 months.

Relations with Cuba probably does not mark the end of the spy wars.
Several suspected Cuban agents have not been prosecuted and others have
not been identified, though they may still be operating within the U.S.
government and exile groups.

Alfonso Chardy: 305-376-3435, @AlfonsoChardy

Source: Will spy wars between Cuba and the U.S. end with restored
relations? | Miami Herald -
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article64238792.html