Posted on 04/20/2003 1:32:50 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
HAVANA - This crumbling, isolated throwback to a cold-war past is probably one of the last places you'd expect to find the sciences of the future.
In Old Havana, wood-paneled pharmacies with crystal chandeliers and empty shelves attract more gawking tourists these days than customers. Food is so scarce that the government urges citizens to grow fruit and vegetables in small urban plots to supplement their diet.
Yet this struggling island nation is chipping away at a longtime US embargo with an unlikely tool: biotechnology.
More than three years ago, Smith-Kline Beecham PLC - a charter member of the capitalist world's pharmaceutical sector - signed an agreement with Cuba's Finlay Institute to market the institute's vaccine against meningitis B - the world's first.
Now called GlaxoSmithKline PLC, the second-biggest pharmaceutical com-pany in the world is running trials for the Cuban vaccine in Europe and Latin America. If those trials are successful, the company says it plans clinical trials in the US.
For Cuba, the deal was a tiny crack in the door that might open up lucrative new markets for its biotechnology products. Besides earning the impoverished communist country much-needed dollars, it could help build new economic bridges with a world that has become a much lonelier place since the collapse of Cuba's old ally, the Soviet Union.
"We have neither money nor time," says Concepcion Campa, the scientist who developed the vaccine and the president of Finlay, Cuba's main research and manufacturing center for human vaccines. With GlaxoSmithKline, which holds a 7 percent share of the world pharmaceutical market, Cuba gains access to marketing heft and a vast commercial network.
The market for such a vaccine is "hundreds of millions of dollars," according to Moncef Slaoui, a senior vice president at GSK Biologicals, the Belgian-based vaccine division of GlaxoSmithKline. Cuba currently earns just $100 million a year from its total pharmaceutical and biotechnology exports.
The official line on science's value
When meeting foreign visitors, Cuban officials like to quote something Fidel Castro said in 1960 just after he marched into power: "The future of our homeland must be that of men of science."
Ironically, the 42-year-old US trade embargo might actually have spurred the island's pursuit to science. Imposed in 1960 by President Kennedy after Mr. Castro infuriated the US by nationalizing $1 billion worth of US-owned property in Cuba, the embargo remains in place decades later.
Unable to import some of the medicines it wanted, Cuba began making its own generic drugs through reverse engineering - piracy by another name. From there sprang a state pharmaceutical industry and later, a biotechnology offshoot.
Cuban officials say the country now produces 80 percent of the types of drugs and medicines used by its 11 million people, though the empty shelves in pharmacies suggest the actual shortfall in quantity may be greater.
The healthcare strategy is straightforward: The government develops the drugs and vaccines according to the demands of Cubans. It then tests them and dispenses them across the population through a network of neighborhood family doctors, polyclinics, and hospitals.
"Cuban science does not produce as much in peer-reviewed English-language scientific journals as its size [would merit], but [there is] more input into social practice," the application of science in a real-world setting, says Sergio Jorge Pastrana, who handles international relations for the 142-year-old Cuban Academy of Sciences.
In the early 1990s, when the economy's implosion got so bad that the average Cuban adult lost 20 pounds, the government continued to set aside 1.5 percent of gross national product each year for scientific research. A total of $1 billion between 1992 and 1996 went toward creating a no-frills, centralized version of Silicon Valley, the Western Havana Scientific Pole. In the mid-1990s, crippled by the economic crisis, Cuba sent its scientists to labs in Sweden, Spain, and Germany so they could continue working.
Today, Cuba's economy is recovering, thanks to emergency liberalization measures that promote tourism and allow Cubans to start limited private businesses and hold and use the US dollar.
At the Western Havana Scientific Pole, scientists at 52 institutes are researching vaccines and therapies for AIDS and Alzheimer's, among others. There are some cooperation agreements - for product sales, joint ventures, contract manufacture and research - with entities in Latin America, China, Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Australia. Cuba has filed applications for 500 patents around the world.
Embargo blocks biggest market
But the biggest market has so far eluded it: Although the US has granted Cuba 24 patents, the embargo has so far prevented it from selling any of the products in America.
There is also some biotechnology research in agriculture, but it has not been commercialized, Cuban officials say, partly for fear that genetically modified food crops might hurt that famed Cuban export - cigars.
Stories of frustration abound. Scientists have limited access to Western journals and can't always afford the latest equipment. They are often denied US visas for scientific exchange.
One Finlay Institute scientist who works with a mass spectrometer, a machine for analyzing biochemicals, says he can't get a US visa to attend conferences to discuss the cutting-edge technology. Another researcher shares his subscription to the journal Nature with 20 colleagues.
They are also abysmally paid, especially when compared with workers in the growing tourist industry, where cash registers ring with dollars, not the Cuban peso. As a desperate Cuba opened its arms to tourists in recent years, a topsy-turvy parallel economy emerged where a chambermaid earns more in tips than a biotech scientist's monthly salary of around $20.
But perhaps the biggest hurdle to Cuba's biotechnology plan is the political climate in the US, especially since the Sept. 11 attacks.
On a recent morning, Luis Herrera, wearing a white lab coat, greeted US journalists visiting his Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology. "Did you already visit the place where the weapons are made here?" he asks cheekily, with a nod to the deep suspicion with which the US views Cuba's biotechnology aspirations. "We don't have money to do that," he says.
In a joint statement Thursday, the two countries condemned terrorism as well as the sanctions. They also called for establishment of an independent Palestinian state and the return of all Palestinian refugees to their homeland. The statement called for cooperation at the United Nations as well as in the Group of 77 countries and the Non-Aligned Movement. Iran currently heads the G-77, an association of developing countries. They agreed also to continue cooperation in pharmaceuticals and medical training.
Before departing Iran, Castro stopped off at the north Tehran home of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, father of the Iranian revolution. He was shown a short film on Khomeini's life and visited his library before heading on to the airport. Earlier in his visit, Castro had laid a wreath at Khomeini's grave.
U.S. sanctions have been in place against Iran since the revolution. Washington severed ties and imposed sanctions after Muslim militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
October 10, 2001 - Cuba forced to sell biotechnology to Iran*** De la Fuente said that between 1995 and 1998, Cuba sold Iran the production technology for a recombinant hepatitis B vaccine; an interferon used for the treatment of some viral diseases and various types of cancer, and streptokinase, used to treat heart attacks and other thrombolytic disorders.
But de la Fuente and other scientists say the same technology could also be used to produce lethal agents to use as biochemical weapons -- like anthrax bacteria or smallpox virus. Many steps in the fermentation process that produces vaccines and other medicines are similar to the one used to manufacture biochemical weapons.
``Many technologies that are used to make medications are the same technologies that could be used for harmful intent,'' said Amy Smithson, a chemical and biological weapons expert at Henry Stimson Center in Washington. ``The fermenters are the same.''
De la Fuente fears that's exactly what Iran intends to do. ``No one,'' he wrote in the journal article, ``believes that Iran is interested in these technologies for the purpose of protecting all the children in the Middle East from hepatitis, or treating their people with cheap streptokinase when they suffer sudden cardiac arrest . . .
``The sale to Iran of the production technology for three of the CIGB's most significant accomplishments . . . is profoundly disturbing to many of us who gave so much time and effort to the development of an economically viable but essentially altruistic biotechnology in our country.''
His revelation comes at the same time the FBI is investigating the possibility that man-made anthrax bacteria was used to poison employees at a South Florida publishing company, and as experts nervously debate the possibility of biochemical assaults in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Evidence in the Sept. 11 investigation has led investigators to crop dusters and unlawfully obtained licenses to drive trucks hauling hazardous material.
De la Fuente, who fled Cuba by boat in 1999, said that although he has no reason to think that Cuba's sale of the technology to Iran was malicious, the outcome could be.
``This technology could be used for the purpose of producing bioweapons and other toxins that could be used in bioterrorist attacks,'' said de la Fuente, now a faculty member at Oklahoma State University.***
May 7, 2002 - Cuba poses bio-threat, U.S. warns-- Some analysts don't think Cuba is developing bio-weapons. *** Michael Powers, an analyst at the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Washington, said weapons experts usually have included Cuba on lists of countries with germ-warfare capability. But "it was never clear that they were using their biomedical infrastructure to produce agents or to try to turn them into weapons," Powers said. There is disagreement on how much proof exists that Cuba is developing a dangerous germ-weapons capability. Stephen Johnson, a specialist on Latin American affairs at Heritage Foundation, said some Cuban emigrants have pointed to dangers.
He said Jose de la Fuenta, an emigre scientist who formerly worked at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana, has reported that Cuba sold Iran technology to produce the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine. The equipment could also be used to produce germ-warfare agents, he said. Johnson said U.S. officials' suspicions have been aroused by the fact that Cuba has spent millions on sophisticated biomedical gear, even though it often has shortages of basic medical products. Some analysts scoffed at the suggestion Cuba is trying to develop such weapons.
Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research center on Latin American affairs, said there has been scant evidence that Cuba was developing such a program. "This is just nuts," he said. "If [Bolton] has any evidence . . . he ought to make it public. Otherwise it's just a smear tactic." Julia E. Sweig, deputy director for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based research center, speculated that the U.S. government had debriefed many Cuban exiles in search of information on the program but had come up with little. She said the remarks suggest the Bush administration, under pressure from anti-Castro Cuban Americans to support for their cause, is looking for a way to make its Cuba policy more distinctive from the Clinton administration's.***
May 12, 2002 - All eyes are on Carter, but what are Castro's intentions? - "..bring America to it's knees"*** Former President Jimmy Carter goes back in time today. In Cuba he will see more than vintage American cars, circa 1950s, smoking up the streets with their patchwork "remodeled" diesel engines. He'll do more than choke on the fumes from the oil refinery near Havana's harbor, the sulfuric acid stinging his eyes whenever the wind turns toward the city. He will be shown all of the Cuban revolution's socialist "triumphs" amid the ruins of communism. He will surely be pained by the contradictions. He'll visit an agricultural cooperative and tour a medical school and the Los Cocos AIDS sanatorium, where Cubans with AIDS are "quarantined" for life. Talk about progressive health care.
Carter even plans a tour of Cuba's Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, a high-tech facility that produces vaccines for other countries. The Bush administration created a stir last week by accusing Cuba of sharing its dual-use biotech capability with "rouge" states that are looking to create plagues for biological warfare. That charge should put into perspective Castro's own warning to the United States during his swing through the Middle East last May. "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees," Castro said at the University of Tehran. "The U.S. regime is very weak and we are witnessing this weakness from close-up."***
Castro Weaponizes West Nile Virus
By Martin Arostegui
As the Bush administration prepares for war with Iraq a growing threat to its rear flank is being ignored, according to senior officials who believe that Cuba's biological-weapons (BW) program is at more advanced stages than officially is acknowledged. There now are reports that P-4 containment systems used to store the deadliest toxins have been identified at suspected bioweapons labs inside Cuba.
A member of the intelligence community expresses concern, but says that an open hearing on this issue would provide "feedback" to Cuba on "how much we know about its BW effort." Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, the source says, was scheduled to deliver details of the Cuban program to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June, but the testimony was suppressed by the intelligence bureaucracy.
In his gagged statement, a copy of which was obtained by Insight, Bolton expresses "frustration" at the apparent unwillingness of U.S. intelligence agencies to disclose information about Cuba's biological weapons which could include anthrax, smallpox and variants of encephalitis such as West Nile virus. Recent outbreaks of West Nile virus that have killed more than 30 Americans and infected another 675 have been traced to birds that may have been infected at Cuban bioweapons labs, according to defecting scientists who report Fidel Castro's experiments using animals as carriers of weaponized germ agents.
Carlos Wotzkow, a leading Cuban ornithologist who defected in 1999, says that Castro's "Biological Front, which coordinates military and scientific research, was extended to the Institute of Zoology in 1991 to develop ways of spreading infectious diseases, including encephalitis and leptospirosis, through implantations in migratory birds."
Roberto Hernandez, another exiled Cuban scientist, says, "We were instructed to look into viruses such as encephalitis which are highly resistant to insecticides. Military-intelligence officers running the labs ordered us to trap birds with migratory routes to the United States with the idea of releasing contaminated flocks which would be bitten by mosquitoes which, in turn, infect humans."
A dead crow infected with West Nile virus recently was discovered on the White House lawn, according to the Washington Post. Sixty similarly infected birds fell around the U.S. Navy base in Boca Chica, Fla., during September 2001, causing an encephalitis epidemic that killed a civilian employee.
Scenarios worthy of Stephen King's sci-fi horrors are corroborated by Col. Alvaro Prendes, a former vice chief of the Cuban air force and exiled leader of Union de Soldados y Oficiales Libres (USOL), a clandestine pro-democracy movement within Cuba's armed forces. He tells Insight that Castro's biotech facilities operate under the close control of a colonel of the Directorate of General Intelligence (DGI), Librado Reina Benitan, a longtime protégé of Raul Castro, Cuba's defense minister and brother of Fidel Castro [see "Fidel Castro's Deadly Secret," July 20, 1998].
One fortified compound near a military hospital in east Havana is the size of two football fields and contains six giant bubbles to retain toxic gases. It is fronted as a cattle-feed producer, according to documents smuggled out of Cuba by military dissidents. The laboratory is equipped with a 10,000 Reid vapor-pressure centrifugal reactor and has its own water system and backup generators. It is in any case supported by high-priority circuits that feed a nearby artillery base storing Russian-made SS-22 medium-range missiles capable of reaching south Florida, according to Cuban documents obtained by Insight.
"Castro plans a Götterdämmerung if his regime becomes seriously threatened by an invasion or internal upheaval," warns Prendes, citing a doomsday plan that is code-named Lucero. "Known dissidents would be rounded up and herded into tunnels beneath Havana to be exterminated with poison gas," according to the former fighter pilot who was close to Castro and was decorated as a "hero of the revolution" for shooting down CIA-manned bombers during the aborted Bay of Pigs operation in 1961.
Cuba already has some experience using weaponized poison gas, having employed it against South African troops and forces from the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), according to Aubin Heyndrickx, a senior U.N. consultant on chemical warfare. Cuban-supported rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia also used poison gas in an attack on the Colombian town of San Adolfo last year, according to an analysis of bomb residues by the U.S. Army's chemical- and biological-warfare center at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
But despite the publicly available evidence presented by highly authoritative sources, U.S. officials are not cleared to make unambiguous statements about Cuba's bioweapons threat. And it has yet to be mentioned by the president or any member of his Cabinet. The CIA's national intelligence officer for Latin America, Fulton Armstrong, is "coordinating talking points" on the issue. But when contacted by Insight he declined comment.
While U.S. intelligence agencies understandably are reluctant to reveal classified material that might compromise methods and informants, a variety of sources in the State Department, the Pentagon, congressional staffs and among media professionals covering national security confirm that Clinton holdovers who retain key positions in the intelligence agencies are using their authority to mislead public opinion on Cuba. This is especially galling to members of the Bush national-security team, and they are known to be complaining loudly about it.
The pro-Castro clique under Bill Clinton was nothing if not brazen. When the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) was researching a segment on Cuba for its internationally acclaimed 1998 TV documentary on the proliferation of biochemical weapons to rogue states, Clinton's national-security shop defended Castro at every turn. "A member of the U.S. intelligence community discredited published reports about Cuba's biowarfare capabilities," a BBC executive producer tells Insight, "saying that no Russian scientists involved in the former Soviet Union's biological-weapons program had ever worked in Cuba."
That was disinformation. Ken Alibek, former deputy director of the Soviet Biopreparat, reveals in his 1999 book, Biohazard, that Castro obtained bioweapon technology directly from top-ranking Biopreparat generals and scientists who made repeated trips to Cuba to provide advice and training during the late 1980s and early 1990s. "We knew that Cuba was interested in biowarfare research. We knew that there were several centers, one of them very close to Havana, involved in military biotechnology," Alibek told a congressional hearing last year. He called the contradictory U.S. government statements on Cuban bioweapons a "confusing situation."
Why this fog has been allowed to persist into the Bush administration is even more confusing, if that is the euphemism, say critics. While Bolton was blowing the whistle on Cuba's biowarfare threat in a speech to the Heritage Foundation on May 6, a top CIA analyst identified as a former member of Clinton's National Security Council (NSC) team and a known advocate of rapprochement with Cuba, was telling Jimmy Carter that there was no evidence to support Bolton's accusations. Carter then embarrassed the administration by citing this U.S. intelligence briefing during a press conference in Havana following a tour of a suspected biochemical lab at the invitation of Fidel Castro.
"There is sufficient information to alert the American public, which deserves to know about the developing threat from Cuba," says Bolton. His view is supported by John Ford, head of the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, who on June 5 told an open congressional hearing that "Cuba does indeed have an offensive biological-weapons research program."
Bolton's more sharply worded statement also criticized "a tendency to underplay Cuba." He drew attention to the case of Ana Belen Montes, a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst who has pleaded guilty to charges of spying for Castro after being caught red-handed communicating with her DGI handlers in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Montes used her position at the Pentagon to try to delete Cuba from the national-security list and influence her colleagues," says Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), who is trying to condition current legislation easing Cuban travel restrictions upon presidential certifications that biological weapons are not being developed on the island. Staffers of the House and Senate intelligence and foreign-relations committees tell Insight that there nonetheless is resistance within the intelligence bureaucracy to "reviewing assessments filed by Montes which underplay Cuban biowarfare capabilities and discredit defectors warning of the danger."
Constantine Menges, a former NSC officer and CIA analyst, says, "We are looking at the same type of intelligence failure which led to last year's Sept. 11 attacks. I don't think it's as much a case of ideological conspiracy as of our intelligence community not wanting to admit that they have been asleep at the switch."
Encouraging the inertia are pressures from an increasingly powerful business lobby of food producers, farming interests and pharmaceutical companies eager to trade with Cuba. Proof of Cuba's biowarfare activities likely would poison congressional support to lift the economic embargo. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), currently a supporter of easing trade restrictions, says, "If it is true that Cuba has biological weapons it would be very serious and we would have to act on this. It would be an entirely new ball game."
Aside from the direct threat that Cuba's bioweapon capabilities pose to U.S. security, senior administration officials, who include Special Negotiator for Chemical and Biological Weapons Donald Mahley, also worry about ongoing Cuban transfers of dual-use biotechnology to Islamic countries closely connected to Middle Eastern terrorist networks. Castro's vice president, Carlos Lage, inaugurated a new biotechnology-research plant in Iran in 2000, purportedly producing Hepatitis B vaccines. According to José de la Fuente, the former director of research at Cuba's Center for Biological Investigations and Genetics, the transferred technology involves biological agents, pathogens and germ-strengthening processes that also are applicable to weaponizing bacteria.
The deal with Iran was transacted through banks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which was Castro's next stop following a state visit to Tehran last year during an Islamic tour that also included the terrorist states of Libya and Syria.
A seemingly neutral gulf kingdom with a low international profile, the UAE would seem an odd destination for Castro. But the small oil state is one of the main international money-laundering centers of the Arab world — one where a series of bank accounts and financial companies has been directly linked to al-Qaeda and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terror network. Debit cards uncovered at al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, inspected by Insight, invariably were issued by banks in the UAE.
Alibek explains how Soviet biotechnology simultaneously was transferred to Cuba, Iran, Iraq and other former Russian allies that share similar bioweapons programs: "The Soviet Union organized courses in genetic engineering and molecular biology for scientists from Eastern Europe, Cuba, Libya, Iran and Iraq. Some 40 foreign scientists were trained annually. Many of them now head biotechnology programs in their own countries."
According to Alibek, Iraq copied Cuban methods to cover up acquisitions of bioweapons technology, such as large industrial fermentation vessels and related equipment. "The model was one we had used to develop and manufacture bacterial biological weapons. Like Cuba, the Iraqis maintained the vessels were intended to grow single-cell protein for cattle feed. What made the deals particularly suspicious were additional requests for exhaust-filtration equipment capable of achieving 99.99 percent air purity — a level we only used in our bioweapons labs," says the world's top biowarfare expert.
On Nov. 4, 2001, Castro was delivering an informal two-hour chat on Havana television about the war on terrorism. He said that Afghanistan was going to be a new Vietnam, that it would take the United States 20 years to defeat the Taliban and that al-Qaeda never would be destroyed. In a brief sound bite that piqued the interest of some U.S. military-intelligence analysts, the Maximum Leader also said that 40 envelopes "containing strange powders" had been intercepted in Cuba, of which five were directed to the United States, Pakistan, Italy and Costa Rica.
Yet, despite the reports of Cuba's biowarfare activities and possible involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks [see "Fidel May Be Part of Terror Campaign," Dec. 3, 2001], Castro never has been named as a "person of interest" in the FBI's anthrax investigations, which instead have focused on Stephen Hatfill, a white, Rhodesian-born U.S. Army scientist who more closely fits the profile of a politically correct villain. A former FBI deputy director told CNN on Aug. 25 that he was perplexed as to why the bureau had failed seriously to investigate a "foreign source" for the anthrax mailings to leading politicians and the media.
U.S. investigators appear to be overlooking two Cuban DGI deep-cover agents indicted in Florida on Aug. 4, 2001, who told the FBI that they had obtained jobs in the U.S. Postal Service on instructions from Havana, which wanted studies of post-office security, through which the deadly anthrax letters moved to kill Americans.
Yes, indeed- I just added it, thanks!
Paul Crespo
Sunday, May 12, 2002
Editor's Note: This article first appeared in American Legion magazine, April 2002.
The U.S. government's detaining of Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo naval base in Cuba is supremely ironic given Fidel Castro's long-standing support for global terrorism.
As we continue our worldwide battle against terrorists, this sly but significant terror monger on our very own doorstep should not be overlooked. Castro is a bankrupt dictator with a decades-long history of support for violent, anti-American terror groups, obsessive hatred of the U.S., sophisticated spy rings operating on our soil and a potentially deadly biowarfare capability.
While he has not been directly linked to the attacks of Sept. 11, considerable circumstantial evidence ties Castro to an international terror network that extends from Afghanistan to the Middle East and South America.
According to an Associated Press report, an Afghan al-Qaeda defector reported seeing Cubans training in camps in the Kunar province of Afghanistan.
On Sept. 15, the government of the Cayman Islands publicly reported that Afghan nationals detained there in the wake of the recent attacks reportedly transited through Cuba carrying fake passports and suspiciously large sums of cash, in the amount of $2 million. Two other people, detained post-9-11 in Panama for their possible financial connection to the bin Laden network, were reportedly en route to Cuba.
One story receiving widespread coverage in the mainstream press was the scandal involving accused Castro spy Ana Belen Montes.
The Washington Post explained that the FBI quickly arrested Montes (the senior Cuba analyst at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency) on Sept. 21 (after only a few short months of surveillance) because they believed she could pass American war plans to Castro's intelligence service, the Directorate of General Intelligence (DGI), which might in turn provide them to bin Laden supporters.
Following the Sept. 11 attack, Montes allegedly transmitted classified information to her DGI spymasters through Cuba's mission to the United Nations. Castro meanwhile reportedly ordered a military alert in Cuba and called up the reserves. Intelligence specialists believe that Castro may have had reasons to fear possible U.S. retaliation.
Montes is the highest-ranking American ever accused of spying for Castro. An influential analyst with high-level access across the entire U.S. intelligence community, she also had considerable input into recent Defense Department reports minimizing the threat from Castro's Cuba.
Cuba's agents operating in the U.S. also include a military spy ring code-named the "Wasp" network, uncovered in Miami. Though the spy ring was dismissed by Castro apologists as incompetent and irrelevant, evidence uncovered during the trial proves these descriptions were wrong.
The FBI has stated this ring was directly involved in orchestrating the deliberate 1996 shoot-down of two small civilian aircraft piloted by the Brothers to the Rescue group over the Florida Straits (murdering three Americans). The FBI also charges the DGI with conducting espionage against U.S. military and civil aviation through a network of some 300 agents operating across the continent.
Quoting federal law enforcement officials, Insight magazine reported that "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." This Cuban spy ring certainly fits that bill.
Questionable Company
The Cuban intelligence service is one of the most effective in the world. According to one Pentagon source, "only a highly sophisticated espionage network," such as Cuba's, could have cracked the code of Air Force One in what was originally believed to have been a breach of security that caused U.S. Secret Service officials to fly the president out of sight on the morning of Sept. 11.
Additionally, Martin Arostegui reported in Insight that al-Qaeda ringleader Mohamed Atta, who organized the Sept. 11 attacks and crashed a hijacked airliner into the World Trade Center, may have met secretly with Cuban undercover agents shortly after his arrival in the United States last year. Atta's contacts may have also included high-level officials of Cuba's biological warfare program. They allegedly spoke with Atta at a Miami motel.
Arostegui said federal investigators suspect that one of Atta's Cuban contacts may have been a top defense ministry officer with personal ties to Castro. The man is thought to have entered the United States under cover of assignment to a Cuban-government delegation visiting the U.S. during the Elian saga. The Czech government has confirmed that Atta similarly had met with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague (though this has since been contested).
A Russian defector has stated that Castro supplied critical intelligence on U.S. military activities to Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War – information gained through his Soviet-built, Russian-financed signals intelligence facility in Lourdes, capable of eavesdropping on phone calls in Washington, and from spies in the U.S.
Until recently, the Russians paid Castro more than $200 million a year in much-needed hard currency for access to Lourdes. In a surprise move, though, Russian President Vladimir Putin suddenly withdrew his support and 1,500 advisers from Cuba in the wake of the attacks on Washington and New York.
Some analysts speculate that he feared Castro may have been using the Lourdes facility to collect intelligence later funneled to bin Laden, Iraq and other terror groups. Castro enjoyed having the Russian advisers there as a shield against a U.S. attack and was furious at their removal.
Unfortunately, China has now seemingly supplanted the Russians as Castro's primary electronic espionage partner and has built a new sophisticated signals intelligence complex in Bejucal, Cuba, operating under the cover of Radio China.
In addition to being used for espionage, these installations are reportedly part of a robust cyber-warfare capability Castro is developing. The FCC has stated they are capable of interfering with U.S. communications and air traffic control. The Chinese at one point also reportedly sent a message to New York air traffic control replicating U.S. military fight codes and falsely identifying themselves as U.S. military transport planes – a chilling foretaste of things to come.
Castro the Puppeteer
Castro's current links to transnational terrorism are all the more plausible given his long-standing, obsessive hatred of the U.S. and track record of support for violent radical extremists. Despite Castro's recent protestations of innocence, he has been an active terrorist sponsor since the 1940s – and in many ways spawned the current global terror network.
In 1958 Castro expressed his passionate belief that he was destined to lead an anti-American crusade. ''I am going to launch another much longer and bigger war against them. I realize now that this is going to be my true destiny,'' he wrote to his trusted aide Celia Sanchez. True to his word, he dispatched Che Guevera and his terrorist mercenaries to Africa, South America and elsewhere in the '60s.
According to various sources, Castro's terror effort mushroomed in the '70s and '80s. As the spearhead of the Soviet Union's global subversion campaign, he trained, equipped and advised an alphabet soup of terror groups and Latin American guerrillas such as the FMLN in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Colombia's FARC and ELN and Peru's Shining Path, as well as the European Red Brigades, Carlos "The Jackal," the IRA, the PLO and the Palestinian PLFP, among others.
Thousands of terrorists reportedly graduated from Cuba's training camps in Matanzas and the Isle of Pines (otherwise known as the Isle of Youth) and spread like a cancer worldwide. Castro's military advisers trained other terrorists in dozens of war-torn countries and left a trail of blood over several continents. Many of these groups also conducted attacks in the U.S.
The Cuban dictator also directly supported violent domestic U.S. terrorists such as the radical Weathermen underground and the Puerto Rican nationalist group Macheteros, responsible for numerous bombings and murders in the U.S. In 1979 and 1980, Castro-sponsored Machetero terrorists destroyed several U.S. Air National Guard jets in Puerto Rico, worth over $45 million, and later murdered two American sailors.
According to Cuban defector Jorge Masetti (a former highly placed Cuban intelligence officer), Castro also organized and partly financed the 1983 Machetero robbery of a Wells Fargo depot in Connecticut, later providing safe haven for one of the terrorists and receiving $4 million of the stolen $7 million via diplomatic pouch through Mexico.
Some argue that the aging Castro is now more interested in the tourism trade than the terror business. This is a dangerous delusion; he is interested in both.
The Cuban dictator has never wavered in his ideological "jihad" against America, even as he has wooed Western investors. 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."
In recent months he has been organizing a new "anti-Western" alliance of rogue states (now including Chavez's Venezuela). As recently as May 2001 Castro toured Syria, Libya and Iran to garner support for this effort. On May 10 in Tehran, the Iranian Press Service reported Fidel Castro stating, "Iran and Cuba, together, can bring America to its knees."
Castro's aggressive, overt terror effort continued as long as the Soviet Union provided him cover and protection. After the fall of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s, however, Castro exchanged his open and active involvement in terrorism for a more subtle and easily disguised role as a mentor-facilitator, intelligence provider and safe harbor.
While Castro may no longer be running active terror training camps in Cuba, he is still intimately connected to the international terror network he helped create, acting as a critical nexus for many disparate terror groups and rogue states. Cuba is currently one of seven nations (along with Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea and Sudan) on the U.S. State Department list of terrorist states.
Despite a campaign in some quarters to remove Cuba from this list, Castro's status is very well deserved. In 2000, the State Department reported that Cuba continued to provide safe haven to several terrorists and U.S. fugitives. Even since the September attacks Castro was discovered hosting terrorist groups such as the IRA, who are training the Marxist guerrillas – the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) – responsible for a savage terror and urban bombing campaign in Colombia.
There are also reportedly a small number of Cubans currently providing support and advice to the FARC (though their exact role is unconfirmed), and Colombian military intelligence has intercepted guerrilla radio communications in which senior FARC military commanders talk about forming an "anti-imperialist front" to launch terrorist attacks against targets in the United States.
Biological Warfare
Increasingly worrisome, too, is Castro's potential chemical and biological weapons development and proliferation. Castro has long been suspected of hiding a biological-chemical weapons program within his sophisticated, Soviet-created biotechnology industry.
In May 1998, Secretary of Defense William Cohen testified before Congress that Cuba possesses advanced biotechnology and is capable of mass-producing agents for biological warfare. High-level Cuban defectors as well as Col. Ken Alibek, former deputy chief of the ex-Soviet Union's biological warfare program and author of "Biohazard," support that assessment; others have described his secret labs in detail.
Castro may also be exporting this capability to his rogue friends. The Miami Herald reported that senior Cuban officials inaugurated a new "biotech" research plant near Tehran in October 2000, despite reports that the Iranians already produce almost all their pharmaceutical needs domestically.
Castro may have exported biological and chemical weapons to other regions as well, specifically to the FARC in Colombia. A FARC bomb that burned out the lungs of an entire police garrison in the Colombian town of San Adolfo last September reportedly contained chlorine-based poison gas. Some analysts believe the Cuban military may be helping FARC develop this chemical warfare capability.
Significantly, Cuban troops are believed to have used chemical weapons against anti-communist guerrillas in Angola and South African troops in the 1980s. Exchanges between bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and Cuban intelligence could thus also involve the provision of chemical weapons and "weaponized" biological strains produced by Cuba's secret biochemical warfare facilities.
(Note: Since this article was initially published, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton has publicy confirmed that the U.S. suspects Cuba of having a "limited offensive biological weapons capabilty" and may be involved in bioweapons proliferation to rogue states.)
Castro's long-standing connections to terrorist groups are undeniable. Numerous indirect links to bin Laden and other terror groups are highly suspicious. His continued anti-American fervor, close intelligence ties to rogue states and terrorists, and potential biowarfare capability make him a dangerous neighbor.
What Should the U.S. Do?
At minimum, America must warn Castro that we will not tolerate Cuba being used as a haven for international terrorists. The United States would also be wise to inform China that we will no longer allow Cuba to be used as an intelligence collection or subversion site against the U.S.
China must be urged to follow the Russian example and withdraw its advisers and technicians immediately. Additionally, the United States should demand that Castro shut down these facilities and allow for independent inspection and verification.
We should also insist on inspecting all suspected chemical/biological research – better stated as warfare – sites on the island.
Finally, prudence dictates that rather than consider removing Castro from the State Department terrorist list, we should redouble and refocus our intelligence efforts to verify and confirm the details of Cuban complicity with international terrorist groups.
Castro is clearly a player in this global terror network. We need to discover quickly just how deeply he is involved and respond accordingly.
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Paul Crespo recently worked as an international political risk and security consultant with the Ackerman Group in Miami. A former Marine Corps special operations and intelligence officer, he served in the Far East and Europe and with the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was also posted as a Defense and Naval Attaché at U.S. embassies in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Latin America.
He graduated from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and has master's degrees from both London and Cambridge Universities in the U.K. He is a member of the Council on Emerging National Security Affairs (CENSA).
E-mail Mr. Crespo at pcrespo@WashingtonPartners.net.
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