At a time when all US Government energies are supposed to be concentrated on
finding bin Laden's terrorist links, it is most revealing that the FBI and
the Justice Department decided to proceed with the arrest of Ana Belén
Montes, the DIA Senior Analyst responsible for Cuban affairs. Usually,
when our counterintelligence is monitoring a suspected foreign agent they
follow the culprit but do not arrest them. That way they can identify
potential additional links. Why was this not done in this case? There are two
possibilities: one, that she could leak to the Cubans relevant
information on our intended response who in turn could pass it to bin Laden; the
other, that there was a turf battle inside the Administration between the Bush
Justice Department and left over elements from the Clinton Administration
at the Pentagon on how to deal with Cuba.
The first is not easy to be discarded. Granted, Castro is unlikely to
be chosen as an ally by bin Laden because he is a deeply religious Islamic
fundamentalist who left a comfortable life as a millionaire in Saudi
Arabia to combat Communism and the Soviets in Afghanistan, while Fidel Castro
gave himself an atheistic and Marxist Constitution and was a Soviet
surrogate.
So, there are profound philosophical and ideological disagreements
between the two. However, they share a profound hatred of the US. Furthermore,
there are many potential intermediaries in the Muslim world, including
Iran, Iraq, Lybia and the PLO, who are playing with both sides and could provide
a bridge between the two. So, the possibility of a Cuban spy at the
Pentagon being a danger to our immediate security in the war on terrorism does
not have to be totally excluded as the reason for ending the observation
phase in this case.
The other explanation goes back to September 14, 1998 when FBI Special
Agent Raúl Fernández went to court in Miami to present an Affidavit in what
turned out to be a most bizarre spy case, the Wasp Network. The main case
against the Wasp Network was that its members--ten arrested and four
absent--were spying on US military installations, as well as on the Cuban exile
community in the Miami area. A most intriguing element mentioned by agent
Fernández in his Affidavit, items 18 and 19, was that one of the spies, Antonio
Guerrero, aka Lorient, had provided the Cubans with "the home addresses
of hundreds of military personnel stationed at the base (Boca Chica Naval
Air Station)". This information would be of little use for Cuban defensive
purposes. However, it could be extremely useful in a commando raid
against that installation. It so happens that the prestigious Jane's Defense
Weekly, dated March 6, 1996, had reported that, since the early
nineties, Cuba was training commandos in VietNam for precisely such an assignment.
According to Jane's story, "Havana's strategy in pursuing such training is to attack the staging
and supply areas for US forces preparing to invade Cuba. The political
objective would be to bring the reality of warfare to the American
public and so exert domestic pressure on Washington."
The spy trial indictment was changed in May 1999 by the Clinton
administration, downplaying the military angle and focusing instead on
Cuba's role in the downing of American civilian planes over
international waters on February 24, 1996. The first was done to please Castro, who
had claimed in a CNN interview that he never spied on US military
installations, that his spying was limited to defend himself from the attacks of Miami
Cubans. Clinton did not want to close the door to an agreement with
Castro as one of his foreign policy successes. The second, to placate the
Cuban-American community for such a concession by raising a highly
emotional issue for them. This was a compensation to boost the Gore candidacy
among Cuban-American voters.
The trial itself was most irregular. The presiding Federal judge agreed
to the defense request to ban the seating of any members of the
Cuban-American community in the jury, which ended having five non-Cuban Hispanics,
three Anglos, three African-Americans and one Asian- American. She also
ordered the prosecution to obtain testimony in Cuba from Cuban intelligence and
military officers, which was later presented to the jury by the defense.
Can you imagine a Cuban intelligence officer being asked to swear over a
Bible to say the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? They
must still be laughing about that one. Since these were the officers who had
ordered the spies to get involved in the conspiracy to down the civilian
planes, they belonged in the bench of the accused, instead of as
witnesses.
But, most incredible of all, two retired Generals, Charles Wilhem and
Edward Atkeson, were witnesses for the defense. Stop here and read it
over again: two American generals were trying to exonerate Castro's spies
from spying against the US military. It is not hard to imagine the
frustration of prosecutors and FBI agents, who monitored for three years the Wasp
Network to gather the evidence presented to the jury, in the presence of
this behavior by senior military officers. In particular that of
General Wilhem, former head of the Southern Command, who testified on April 16,
2001 that he ignored the FBI warnings because the Cubans could not penetrate
the security provisions in effect at his command. Somehow, the evidence
gathered and presented by the FBI and the prosecution must have seemed
more persuasive to the jury, because they ignored the bizarre testimony of
these two generals to find the Wasp Network spies guilty of both charges:
spying on the US military and conspiracy to commit murder in the case of the
civilian planes downed on February 24, 1996.
To understand these two generals' bizarre behavior it is important to
point out that during the Clinton administration a naive theory was developed
somewhere at the Pentagon think tanks, most likely the National Defense
University, to the effect that the optimum transition in Cuba would be
one controlled by the Castro brothers. This would satisfy three basic US
national security objectives: i) avoid a mass migration; ii) avoid a
civil war forcing a US intervention; and, iii) provide assurances of
cooperation in drug interdiction. Of course, the fact that this did not take into
account at all the possible expectations of the Cuban people, did not
seem to matter to the think tankers. The same arrogant blindness that led
us into the Bay of Pigs disaster seems to prevail in the thinking of these
Pentagon analysts. Or, was it an idea planted by the senior DIA analyst?
In the implementation of this strategy, generals Wilhem and Atkeson
visited Cuba and had long meetings with Castro, one lasted nine hours and the
other five hours. General Atkeson went on to report on their Cuban activities
in an article in the military journal ARMY, issue of May 15, 2001. Fidel
was delighted and Raul said twice in public events, first in December, 2000
and again in January, 2001, that the wisest thing for the Bush
administration was to come to terms with the Cuban revolution while Fidel was still
alive.
The generals' answer for the future of Cuba was to make Raul the Batista
of the new century.
Another general involved in this exercise was McCaffrey, Clinton's Drug
Czar. His angle was that we should cooperate with Castro in drug
interdiction, one of the unfulfilled goals of his last year in the
Clinton Administration. On August 28, 2001, a coordinated event, or a strange
coincidence, took place. On that day, Cuba's Justice Minister expressed
their willingness to cooperate with the US in drug interdiction and
General McCaffrey gave a speech at Georgetown University in which he told
President Bush, in an incredibly arrogant tone, that his Administration should
create a joint Caribbean drug interdiction command under a Coast Guard Admiral
with, among others, Cuban participation and access to our intelligence
and even equipment and financing.
This advice has to be considered in the light of the abysmal record of
McCaffrey in the case of General Gutierrrez Rebollo, whom he praised
extensively upon his appointment as Mexican Drug Czar in 1997, to see
the man arrested two weeks later for being on the payroll of Amado Carrillo
Fuentes, the so-called King of the Skies. During the trial of Gutierrez
Rebollo, now serving a sentence of 77 years in prison, it came out that
he was turning over to the Amado Carrillo cartel the intelligence and
equipment the US was providing Mexico, so Carrillo could monitor rival cartels.
When I raised this point from the audience, McCaffrey did not seem pleased.
In fact, he rudely rejected any information that contradicted his
conclusions.
Somehow, the whole scheme started to fall apart when the Wasp Network
jury ignored the advice of the two generals and found the spies guilty on June
8, 2001. Castro does not expect a judiciary behavior that is independent
of the will of the military and, therefore, is likely to have been furious
with the dismal results of Wilhem's and Atkeson's efforts on behalf of his
spies.
After a short delay, on June 20, 2001, he launched a national
mobilization campaign, a la Elian, to win a reversal of that decision. However, of
late, that campaign has turned mute and the box with patriotic slogans in
GRANMA's front page has been removed. Castro must have lost any hope when the
Justice Department proceeded to arrest two more spies related to the
Wasp Network, both of whom entered their plea bargains the same day the DIA
spy was arrested. This last arrest completely ridicules the claims of the
two generals that Cuban intelligence had no capability to obtain any
military information from the US.
Evidently, there was a difference of opinion between the FBI and the
Justice
Department and some people in the military left over from the Clinton
Administration on the issue of the threat represented by Cuban spying.
We
can assume that the generals were acting on an option developed with
some
substantial inputs from the DIA analyst working for Castro. After some
initial hesitation under the Bush Administration, it seems that the FBI
and
the prosecutors won from John Ashcroft the support denied to them by
Janet
Reno. We do not know what has been the position of the Rumsfeld team in
relation to what the generals were advocating. But, the arrest of the
Senior Analyst on Cuba at the DIA indicates that, if there was any
support
for their notion within the new Pentagon leadership, it is now a moot
issue.
It is evident Ashcroft has prevailed. Besides, the Pentagon will now
have
to revise all policies in which Castro's spy had an input. Quite a
setback
for Castro.
Ernesto F. Betancourt
9/23/01
