Ernesto F. Betancourt. Monday, Sept. 24, 2001.
NewsMax.com.
At a time when all U.S. 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 have 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 make an arrest. That way they can
identify potential additional links. Why was this not done in this case? There
are two possibilities. One is that she could leak relevant information about our
intended response to the terrorist attacks to the Cubans, who in turn could pass
it on to bin Laden. The other is that there was a turf battle inside the
administration between the Bush Justice Department and leftover elements from
the Clinton administration at the Pentagon on how to deal with Cuba.
The first possibility is not easy to discard. 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 men.
However, they share a profound hatred of the United States. Furthermore,
there are many potential intermediaries in the Muslim world, including Iran,
Iraq, Libya and the PLO, which 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
completely excluded as the reason for ending the observation phase in this case.
The other explanation goes back to Sept. 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 – 10 arrested and four absent – were
spying on U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
Clinton Administration's Role
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
Feb. 24, 1996. The first was done to please Castro, who had claimed in a CNN
interview that he never spied on U.S. 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 was done 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.
American Generals Testify
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 U.S. 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, over the presence of this behavior by senior
military officers, in particular that of General Wilhem.
Wilhelm, former head of the Southern Command, 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. The evidence gathered and
presented by the FBI and the prosecution must have seemed more persuasive to the
jury, because jurors ignored the bizarre testimony of these two generals to find
the Wasp Network spies guilty of both charges: spying on the U.S. military and
conspiracy to commit murder in the case of the civilian planes downed on Feb.
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 U.S. national
security objectives: i) avoid a mass migration; ii) avoid a civil war that would
force a U.S. 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 lasting nine hours and the other
five hours. General Atkeson went on to report on their Cuban activities in an
article in the May 15, 2001, issue of the military journal ARMY.
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.
Drug Czar McCaffrey's Involvement
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
Aug. 28, 2001, either a coordinated event or a strange coincidence took place.
On that day, Cuba's justice minister expressed Cuba's willingness to
cooperate with the U.S. 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 Gen. 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 U.S. 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.
The Jury Decides
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 of obtaining any military information from the
U.S.
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 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.
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