By Martin Arostegui. Posted Nov. 9, 2001.
Insight Magazine
At 6:30 p.m. on Sept. 14, Ana Belen Montes, a senior analyst at the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA), walked into a public telephone booth outside
Washington's National Zoo and made two calls to pager numbers later traced by
federal agents to Cuba's Directorate of General Intelligence (DGI). She already
had compromised the identities of CIA agents, revealed U.S. military secrets and
exposed the contents of classified files. But, as Montes sent repeated signals
to her DGI handlers during the days immediately following the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks on the Pentagon and the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the FBI
was given orders to act.
The Sept. 21 arrest of a Fidel Castro mole deeply burrowed into the U.S.
defense establishment at such a moment even as weapons-grade anthrax was
being mailed to media and congressional targets raises serious questions
about a possible Cuban connection with the international terrorist conspiracy
targeting the United States. Concerns about Cuba's continuing threat to U.S.
national security were voiced recently by the DIA director, Vice Adm. Tom
Wilson. Before entering a closed session of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence he told reporters that "Cuba could initiate information
warfare or computer-network attacks that could seriously disrupt our military."
While there has been a tendency to play down Castro's capabilities to engage
the United States in asymmetrical warfare, "they are getting renewed
attention in the light of recent events," according to a Pentagon source.
The source tells Insight that only a highly sophisticated espionage network,
such as the one operating from Cuba, could have cracked the code of Air Force
One in an apparent breach of security that caused U.S. Secret Service officials
to whisk the president out of sight on the morning of Sept. 11.
A sudden decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to shut down Russia's
electronic listening station at Lourdes near Havana by next year, announced just
hours before his meeting with President George W. Bush at the Oct. 19 economic
summit in Shanghai, "reflects the degree of alarm over Cuba's intelligence
operations," according to a U.S. defense analyst in Washington. Congress
already was threatening to freeze financial aid to Moscow unless it dismantled
the intelligence facility that gives Castro a degree of international leverage
out of proportion to the bankrupt state of his communist regime.
Despite some residual support for Castro in the Kremlin, a Cuban delegation
visiting Moscow to procure additional funding for the Lourdes facility abruptly
was dismissed with the announcement that instead the listening post would be
closed. Influential elements in Moscow fear that the rogue use of Cuban spy
facilities could drag Russia into an unwanted confrontation with Washington.
According to Cuban exile Ernesto Betancourt, some Russian officials were highly
disturbed by a 1999 incident recorded by the Federal Communications Commission
in which Cuban electronic-warfare specialists penetrated New York's
air-traffic-control system by simulating U.S. Air Force flight codes. The
signals, which seriously threatened to disrupt air traffic, were traced to a
1,500 kilowatt transmitter operating west of Havana.
As Russia and the United States try to close ranks against the common threat
posed by Muslim terrorist networks in Central Asia, say intelligence insiders,
Castro's growing ties with radical Islamic movements have become a source of
worry for both governments. During his recent tour of Syria, Libya, Iran, Qatar,
the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia, the Cuban dictator told a cheering crowd
of Muslim students at the University of Tehran, "Together we will bring
America to its knees."
Agence France-Presse reported that Castro, in an apocalyptic speech on May
10, told his Muslim audience in Iran: "America is weak. I have studied its
weaknesses from very close by. I tell you, the imperialist king will finally
fall." Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Castro followed the lead of
hard-line Muslim leaders by blaming "this tragedy" on "the
terrorist policies of the United States."
There are signs that Castro's new alignment with fundamentalist Islam could
go beyond crowd-pleasing declarations. U.S. law-enforcement agencies have
indications that Cuba may have assisted the logistics and planning for the
latest wave of terrorist attacks. Insight has learned that al-Qaeda ringleader
Mohammed Atta, who organized the Sept. 11 attacks and crashed a hijacked
airliner into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, may have met
secretly with Cuban undercover agents shortly after his arrival in the United
States last year. The Czech government has confirmed that Atta similarly had met
with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague.
Federal investigators believe that Castro had been exploiting the
international controversy unleashed by the Elian Gonzalez case to flood the
United States with intelligence agents including high-level officials of
Cuba's biological-warfare program who allegedly spoke with Atta at a Miami
motel. Federal investigators suspect that Atta's Cuban contact was a top
defense-ministry officer with personal ties to Castro who entered the United
States under cover of assignment to a Cuban-government delegation escorting
Elian's two grandmothers, who supposedly were coming to mediate the custody
battle.
"Information which Atta's al-Qaeda cells readily possessed on flight
schools, airport security and airline flight patterns only could have been
obtained through an intelligence infrastructure already in place," says a
federal law-enforcement official. FBI affidavits filed in connection with the
roundup of a Cuban spy ring involved in the 1996 shootdown of two small aircraft
over the straits of Florida charge the Cuban DGI with conducting espionage
against U.S. military and civil aviation through a network of some 300 agents
operating across the continent.
Exchanges between bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and Cuban intelligence also
could involve the provision of weaponized biological strains produced by Cuba's
extensive chemical/biological warfare facilities exposed by Insight three years
ago (see "Fidel Castro's Deadly Secret," July 20, 1998). Kenneth
Alibek, who developed anthrax as deputy director of the Soviet biological
warfare Biopreperat program, says in his book Biohazard, published last year,
that Castro has since been running an advanced biological-weapons program
administered by scientists trained in Moscow in the 1990s.
Reports smuggled out by Cuban dissident scientists confirm that Castro's
research has concentrated on developing undetectable methods of spreading deadly
bacteria, including the use of contaminated bird flocks. Cuba, meanwhile, has
been engaging in scientific exchanges with Iraq, say these scientists. A year
ago, Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage opened a biotechnological
research-and-development plant in Iran, paving the way for Castro's visit to
that country last May.
Atta's dealings with the DGI are not the only contacts reported between
Cuba's military intelligence and al-Qaeda. The Associated Press reported on
March 4, 2000, that a young Afghani who trained at a camp run by bin Laden in
northeast Afghanistan says he saw advisers there from Chechnya, Sudan, Libya,
Iran, North Korea and Cuba. Some of these foreigners, he said, had brought
biological/chemical weapons, which were stored in caves.
Three Afghani nationals and suspected al-Qaeda members caught trying to
deposit $2 million in a bank in the Cayman Islands last August were found to
have entered the British colony on a commercial flight from nearby Cuba using
false Pakistani passports. British authorities who arrested the three men
believe that they were handling drug proceeds laundered in Havana.
Colombia's former national police chief, Gen. Rosso José Serrano,
maintains that Cuba also has facilitated contacts between radical Muslim
militants and leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.
Serrano says that about 100 Afghanis have entered Colombia during the last
decade to introduce cultivation of heroin poppies in guerrilla-held areas. An
Egyptian terrorist belonging to al-Gamal al-Islamiya who was wanted in
connection with the 1997 massacre of 80 Western tourists near Cairo
entered Colombia illegally in 1998 to hold talks with FARC and was arrested and
turned over to U.S. authorities.
Cuban biological/chemical-warfare technology also has been detected in
Colombia. A FARC bomb that burned out the lungs of an entire police garrison in
the Colombian town of San Adolfo last September contained chlorine-based poison
gas, according to a lab analysis of the device. Some 20 Cuban military advisers
currently are operating with FARC, according to Colombian army intelligence. It
also has intercepted guerrilla radio communications in which FARC's military
commander, Jorge Briceno, alias "Mono Jojoy," talks about forming an "anti-imperialist
front" to launch terrorist attacks against targets in the United States. "To
take away their economic resources wherever they may be, reach into North
America and get to their own territory," says Briceno, "to make them
feel the pain which they have inflicted on others."
In September, meanwhile, as Montes frantically transmitted information to
her DGI spymasters through Cuba's mission to the United Nations, according to an
FBI affidavit, Castro was ordering a military alert in Cuba and calling up
reserves. A CIA psychiatric profiler who has studied Castro's personality
believes that the Cuban dictator was displaying "geriatric overexertion."
But top intelligence specialists tell Insight that Castro may have had reasons
to fear a possible U.S. retaliation when President George W. Bush declared his
war on terrorism.
"Tours through radical Islamic states by Castro and his close
Venezuelan ally, President Hugo Chavez, in the months prior to the September
attacks indicate some level of complicity or knowledge of what was going to
happen," says Lisette Bustamante, a former aide to Castro who currently
works on the Spanish daily newspaper La Razon.
Not only were statements by both leaders in their Middle Eastern trips laced
with violent anti-American rhetoric, Bustamante points out, but Chavez quite
candidly told reporters that his talks with Saddam Hussein and heads of other
oil-producing states involved the creation of a "new anti-imperialist axis"
against Western industrialized economies.
It was just the sort of anti-American blather that tends to excite the
faithful remnant of the old-guard communists, say U.S. intelligence analysts.
Mysterious predictions about some catastrophic event in the United States began
to circulate in the electronic traffic and even were voiced by Russia's Pravda
on Aug. 1 under the headline, "The Dollar and the U.S. Will Fall."
Based on interviews with the Malaysian ambassador to Moscow and a group of
Russian economists, the report was taken seriously enough for members of
Russia's parliament, the Duma, to advise Russian citizens to cash out dollars.
An adviser to the Duma's Commission on Economic Politics, Tatyana Koryagina,
even specified late August or early September as the likely time for an attack
on the United States that would lead to its economic collapse.
Martin Arostegui is a free-lance writer for Insight magazine.
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