Yahoo! March 9, 2001.
Spy Trial Focuses On Brothers To The Rescue Shootdown
WPLG Click10.com. Friday March 09 11:05 AM EST
The trial of five Cubans accused of spying will focus on the shoot down of
two Brothers to the Rescue planes, and whether the U.S. government knew it would
happen.
Thursday, an official with the FAA testified that Brothers to the Rescue
founder Jose Basulto was repeatedly warned not to fly into Cuban airspace.
Cuban Migs shot down and killed four Brothers to the Rescue flyers over the
Florida Straits in 1996. Prosecutors are trying to prove that one of the accused
spies informed Cuba when and where the Brothers pilots would be flying.
Attorneys defending the accused spies are blaming the shoot down on
Brothers' founder Basulto.
They say that he knew of Cuba's threats and ignored them.
Richard Nuccio, the former point man for Cuba in the Clinton administration
is expected to be called to testify Friday.
Nuccio has said that he had no hard evidence of a planned shoot down.
Recently Declassified CIA Reports
By The Associated Press, March 9, 2001
The formerly secret analytical reports released by the CIA (news - web
sites) on Friday touch on a wide variety of topics. Among them:
-In October 1978, the CIA forecast that the Vatican's elevation of the
archbishop of Poland to the papacy earlier that year would make it "even
more difficult'' for Moscow to check Poland's political gravitation to the West.
"The election of a Polish pope will contribute to an increase in
nationalism in East Europe,'' it said. Two years later the Solidarity movement
in Poland sparked waves of social protest that led to the downfall of communism
in Poland and, years later, throughout East Europe.
-Western news reports about advances in U.S. stealth aircraft technology,
starting in the mid-1970s, may have helped the Soviet Union guide its military
intelligence efforts. But such reporting also "complicates the job faced by
those Soviet analysts struggling to determine the capabilities of U.S. stealth
systems,'' an August 1988 CIA report said. The blending of fact and speculation
in news accounts kept the stealth program "shrouded in mystery'' and
perpetuated false rumors, it said.
-A report on Cuba in March 1963, just months after the missile crisis that
brought the United States and the Soviet Union close to nuclear war, saw
potential military danger in Cuba's announced plan to build a Soviet-financed
fishing port in the Bay of Havana. The CIA feared the port would provide Moscow
with a base that could extend the effective range of operations of trawler types
of vessels for military and space surveillance missions along the U.S. Atlantic
coast.
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