Posted on 04/07/2002 4:27:00 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Cuban "diplomats" and Puerto Rican Terrorists
Source: The Miami Herald
Published: November 2, 1999 Author: Juan O. Tamayo
Posted on 04/19/2000 10:47:32 PDT by Prodigal Daughter
Cuban linked to terrorists may get diplomatic visa
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
jtamayo@herald.com
WASHINGTON -- A Cuban diplomat linked to Puerto Rican terrorists will receive a U.S. visa to work in Washington once Cuba agrees to let in two State Department officials assigned to Havana, U.S. officials say. The FBI initially filed a formal veto to Fernando Garcia Bielsa's assignment to the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, but later reviewed its decision and withdrew the objection, the officials added. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-NC, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has called Garcia Bielsa ''a notorious Cuban intelligence operative'' and hinted at Clinton administration pressures on the FBI to reverse itself.
The State Department ''now has no legitimate reason to deny [Garcia Bielsa] a visa, but they're waiting for reciprocity for the people waiting to go to Havana,'' said one congressional source knowledgeable about the controversy.
The State Department and the Cuban Foreign Ministry maintain there's no official link between the Garcia Bielsa case and the delays on Cuban visas requested by two State Department officials assigned to Havana.
REPORTED MEETINGS
U.S. officials said the FBI has intelligence reports showing Garcia Bielsa met often in Cuba in the 1970s with two radical Puerto Rican pro-independence groups, the Macheteros and Armed Forces of National Liberation, known as FALN. A wave of FALN and Machetero terror bombings around the United States in the early 1970s killed six people and wounded more than 60. Police suspect the Macheteros of four bombings that injured one person in Puerto Rico last year.
Garcia Bielsa was a top official of the Americas Department of the Cuban Communist Party in the 1970s, then tasked by President Fidel Castro with training and arming leftist guerrilla groups around Latin America. The FBI based its objection of Garcia Bielsa on his 1970s meetings with the Puerto Rican radicals. Under U.S. procedures the veto would have forced the State Department to deny him a visa.
Queried by the State Department, the FBI later reviewed its evidence and procedures and decided that meetings alone were not enough to deny the Cuban a visa, congressional officials said.
FBI spokesmen declined to explain either decision. The Cuban Interests Section in Washington said only that Garcia Bielsa is still awaiting a State Department reply to his visa request.
LETTER TO ALBRIGHT
Helms, in an angry letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright Sept. 21, hinted that Garcia Bielsa had done far more than meet with the Puerto Rican radicals but offered no details. A conservative Washington magazine, Insight, three days later quoted a U.S. intelligence official as saying that Garcia Bielsa ''personally oversaw the funding and direction of the Macheteros.
Cuba has long been on the State Department's list of nations linked to international terrorism, along with others such as Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria and North Korea.
The 1998 list notes that while there was ''no evidence'' Cuba sponsored any attacks in the previous year, ''it continues to provide sanctuary to terrorists from several different . . . organizations.''
Among the some 90 U.S. fugitives alleged to be living in Cuba are several Machetero and FALN members and former Black Panther member Joanne Chesimard. Washington and Havana have no extradition agreement.
Note: The Puerto Rican terrorists involved in those crimes were pardoned by Clinto/Hillary to pander to the Puerto Rican vote in New York at the prodding of Castro’s long time apologist, Congressman Jose Serrano.
For more information please open www.cubanet.org/Cnews/y99/sep99/27e9.htm A Visa for Castro’s Terrorism Chief in Washington? By J. Michael Waller, Insight on the News Online, Sep 24/99
By Pete Yost
Associated Press Writer
Friday, Sept. 21, 2001; 9:31 p.m. EDT
WASHINGTON -- A Pentagon intelligence analyst who attended war games conducted by the U.S. Atlantic Command in 1996 was charged Friday with spying for Cuba.
Ana Belen Montes, an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, transmitted a substantial amount of classified information to the Cuban intelligence service, an FBI affidavit alleged.
Montes appeared before a U.S. magistrate in Washington and was charged with conspiracy to deliver U.S. national defense information to Cuba. She entered no plea and was ordered held without bond.
Montes has worked for the DIA, the intelligence arm of the Defense Department, since 1985, authorities said.
In a 17-page affidavit, the FBI alleged that the Cuban intelligence service passed messages to Montes via shortwave radio and that the DIA analyst began spying for Cuba nearly five years ago.
The FBI secretly entered Montes' residence under a court order May 25 and uncovered information about several Defense Department issues, including a 1996 war games exercise conducted by the U.S. Atlantic Command, authorities said.
According to the affidavit, the DIA said that Montes attended the war games exercise in Norfolk, Va., as part of her official duties at DIA. The FBI said it found information on the hard drive of her laptop computer.
One partially recovered message deals with "a particular special access program related to the national defense of the United States," which is so sensitive that it could not be publicly revealed in the court documents, the document said.
According to the FBI's affidavit, some of the messages suggested that Montes disclosed the upcoming arrival of a U.S. military intelligence officer in Cuba.
"As a result," the FBI said, "the Cuban government was able to direct its counterintelligence resources against the U.S. officer."
The FBI said Montes got a message back from her Cuban handlers stating, "We were waiting here for him with open arms."
One message found on the hard drive was from her Cuban intelligence service handlers and said that she had provided "tremendously useful ... information," said the FBI.
According to the FBI, another message from her Cuban contact said in regard to the 1996 war games exercise: "Practically everything that takes place there will be of intelligence value. Let's see if it deals with contingency plans and specific targets in Cuba."
The DIA confirmed that Montes and a colleague were briefed on the highly sensitive program on May 15, 1997.
The FBI said they had Montes under surveillance since May.
It was unclear whether the Montes case was directly related to a ring in Florida convicted of spying for Cuba. However, the FBI affidavit notes repeatedly that methods of passing classified information that Montes allegedly used were the same as those used by the Miami defendants.
Five Florida defendants were convicted in June, and two pleaded guilty in Miami Friday, bringing to seven the number of defendants in a spy ring that prosecutors have labeled "The Wasp Network."
During their surveillance of Montes, the FBI trailed her around suburban Washington as she used a series of pay phones to make calls. The FBI said it believes that "the pay phone calls were in furtherance of Montes' espionage."
The FBI said the Cuban intelligence service often communicates with clandestine agents outside Cuba by broadcasting encrypted messages at high frequencies which transmits a series of numbers. The clandestine agents monitoring the message on a shortwave radio keys in the numbers onto a computer, then uses a disk containing a decryption program to convert the numbers into text.
The FBI said that is the method that Montes used to communicate. The affidavit said Montes also communicated with the Cuban intelligence service by making calls to a pager number during her pay telephone calls.
The FBI agent said that "based on the evidence ... I believe probable cause exists" that Montes has been conspiring to pass secrets to Cuba since Oct. 5, 1996, the day she purchased her laptop computer.
A DIA spokesman declined to comment beyond saying when Montes had gone to work for the agency.
Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Fla, said Cuba shares intelligence information with terrorist states. "It was critically important that the spy be stopped now as the United States embarks upon a worldwide war against terrorism," he said.
The DIA, based at Bolling Air Force Base in southeast Washington, D.C., provides analyses of foreign countries' military capabilities and troop strengths for Pentagon planners. It also has offices within the Pentagon. Along with the CIA, National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, the DIA is one of the main agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.
The FBI affidavit said Montes worked at Bolling Air Force Base.
In June, Mariano Faget, a U.S. immigration official convicted of disclosing classified information to aid Cuba, was sentenced to five years in prison.
Faget, once the second-ranking immigration official in Miami, was convicted after an investigation that also lead to the expulsion of a Cuban spy.
© Copyright 2001 The Associated Press ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The above is sent to you by RCB (Chachi) FOR FREEDOM & JUSTICE GROUP http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ForFreedomandJustice ForFreedomandJustice-owner@yahoogroups.com
CASTRO AND THE FINANCING OF THE ETA TERRORISM. Fidel Castro, who is, according to Forbes Magazine, among the richest chief of states in the world while the Cuban people is starving to death, have the drug traffic among his main sources of income and as intermediary the money laundering of the main terrorist organizations. Cuba is a conduit for the financing of the Spanish terrorist organization, ETA.
In 1966 six members of the ETA arrived in Cuba from Panama in order to transfer and invest their war chest in the Island enabling them to auto-finance their terrorist network out of international police surveillance. After the closing of their newspaper “Egin” in Spain and the investigation of the finance sources of the ETA by the Spanish Judge, Baltasar Garzón, which resulted in finding in 1998 that there was at least a company in Cuba dedicated to the laundering of the terrorists’ money through out export and import deals between Cuba and the Basque Country.
In March 1992, with the capture of the important leaders of the ETA in Bidart, among the documents that were found was a list of companies. Nevertheless, the relationship of those companies with the ETA could not be proven at the time.
The ex-leader of the ETA, Carlos Ibarguren was shown to be in charge of Gadusmar in Cuba, a company with headquarters in Bermeo (in the Basque Region) dedicated to the import and export of codfish, but at the time, the Spanish police did not even follow the leads. Finally, when those leads were corroborated by other sources after the closing of the daily “Egin”, judge Garzon found that he had a case and placed Gadusmar under surveillance. The same company appointed Carlos Ibarguren and Agustín Azcarate as their delegates and men of trust in Cuba in 1996.
At the time, about 15 members of the ETA (etarras) lived in Cuba-an still live there, each one receiving one thousand dollars a month (in Cuba the average salary is $15 dollars per month, a physician makes $40). Gadusmar paid the terrorists. In June 1998, judge Garzon, imprisoned twelve members of the group because of their relation with the financial branch of the ETA. One of them was Juan Pablo Dieguez Gomes, chief administrator and responsible for Gadusmar.
Note: Judge Baltazar Gaston tried to prosecute General Pinochet for crimes against humanity, although he did not acquiesced to do likewise with Castro who had a much worse record of crimes and violations of human rights.
Published Sunday, August 22, 1999, in the Miami Herald
Torturers' aim was `total surrender' Savage beatings bent captives to will of man dubbed `Fidel'
By JUAN O. TAMAYO
FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla. -- Retired Air Force Col. Ed Hubbard says he holds no hate for ``Fidel, the Cuban government agent who viciously tortured him and 17 other U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam three decades ago.
Almost daily for one year, the man the POWs nicknamed Fidel whipped them with strips cut from rubber tires until their buttocks ``hung in shreds, and trussed them in ropes and wires to tear at limbs and cut into flesh.
Fidel was one of three Cubans sent to North Vietnam by Havana to deal with American POWs, in what became known as the Cuba Program.
He whipped and kicked one POW so fiercely in 1968 that the American went into a catatonic state and later died, in what a new book on U.S. POWs in Vietnam calls ``one of the most heinous and tragic atrocity cases.
Hubbard himself was beaten so brutally by ``Fidel'' during one 1967 interrogation session that fellow POW Jack Bomar recalled finding him afterward unconscious on a cell floor, ``a bleeding, broken, bruised mass.
Concealed for decades by official U.S. secrecy and the shadows of a war that many simply wanted to forget, the full story of Fidel and the so-called Cuba Program is finally becoming public.
Honor Bound, a book published in April with Department of Defense assistance, devotes 13 pages to the ``unusually intensive and prolonged operation that monopolized the [prison's] torture machinery for much of the year.''
A two-inch-thick stack of documents declassified by the Defense Department's Prisoner of War, Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) for a string of congressional hearings in 1996 provide extensive and gruesome details on the Cuba Program.
And a DPMO official has now reported that two North Vietnamese army colonels confirmed to him in 1992 that ``Fidel'' was indeed Cuban and had tortured American POWs -- but without Hanoi's official approval.
DIFFICULT TO FORGET
Some former POWs consider suing Cuba
``I've moved on with my life, said Hubbard, a motivational speaker living in Fort Walton Beach who uses his POW experiences to celebrate the human spirit. Then he smiles and adds: ``But if I see `Fidel' again, maybe I'd turn him over to Bomar.
He knows that Bomar has not forgotten the broken nose, broken cheek and busted eardrum he suffered in one particularly brutal beating by ``Fidel'' after he insulted Cuban-Argentine guerrilla Ernesto ``Che Guevara.
``I would kill him, said Bomar, another former Air Force colonel who, like his fellow POWs, was handpicked by ``Fidel and two Cuban ``good guy interrogators, ``Chico and ``Garcia, for what they dubbed the Cuba Program.
Some former POWs angry with the DPMO's handling of the Cuba case say they may even file suit against Havana, following the example set in Miami by relatives of three Brothers to the Rescue pilots killed by Cuban MiGs in 1996.
``I don't mind admitting it -- I want to harass the Vietnamese, said Mike Benge, a former POW who was not part of the Cuba Program but has long accused the DPMO of failing to properly investigate allegations that Chinese and Soviet officers interrogated U.S. POWs.
DPMO officials in Washington declined to comment to The Herald on ``Fidel,'' the Cuba Program or the many controversies surrounding the agency's handling of the case.
Sketchy versions of the story of ``Fidel'' appeared in a handful of U.S. publications from 1973, soon after Hanoi began freeing American POWs, until mid-1977, but the tale drew little attention.
Perhaps that was because most POWs obeyed Pentagon orders to keep quiet, to protect POWs who might remain in Vietnam, and perhaps because Fidel's identification as a Cuban was then only an unconfirmed allegation by the POWs.
But now the newly released DPMO documents, the book Honor Bound by Stuart Rochester and Frederick Kiley, and Herald interviews with Hubbard, Bomar and three other Fidel victims provide the fullest account yet of a significant chapter in the history of Vietnam-era POWS.
``This marked the first and only time that non-Vietnamese were overtly involved in the exploitation of American prisoners, said a 1975 U.S. Air Force analysis of the Cuba Program declassified in 1996.
When Fidel and Chico showed up around August 1967 at the POW camp known as ``The Zoo,'' a former French movie studio on the southwestern edge of Hanoi, it was clear to the 50 prisoners there that they were no ordinary visitors. While the camp's North Vietnamese commandant rode a bicycle to work, Fidel arrived in a car chauffeured by a Hanoi army officer and always sat to the commandant's right, a position of honor, Bomar said.
Debriefed after they returned home, POWs held at The Zoo described Fidel as about six feet one inch tall, in his early 30s, muscular, ramrod-straight, swarthy and handsome enough to be compared to movie star Fernando Lamas.
They described Chico as more light-skinned, almost blond and in his 40s. He liked to play Spanish-sounding songs on the camp's organ, and often wore a beret with a visor, the type then popular in Cuba.
Both spoke good if accented English, but while Fidel had full command of American slang and even obscenities, Chico struggled with words like Piper Cub, pronouncing it ``peeper koob,'' according to excerpts from the debriefings.
Fidel interviewed POWs and soon selected Hubbard, Bomar and eight other Air Force and Navy pilots or navigators shot down over North Vietnam, segregating them in a block of four cells that the POWs nicknamed ``Stable.''
That, the POWs said, is when the torture began, after a few cursory questions -- such as whether they liked Mexican food -- apparently designed less to elicit intelligence information than to provide an excuse for beatings.
While Chico always played the ``good guy, Fidel was a savage torturer one day and a friend the next, a man who would ``hammer one POW, then play Frank Sinatra tapes and offer chewing gum to the next.
``Under different circumstances, Fidel might have been an interesting guy to talk to, former Zoo POW Allan Carpenter told The Herald. ``But I can't have anything but loathing for him.
Level of violence worsens
As days passed, Fidel notched up the torture. ``He loved direct hits to the face with the tire strips that the POWs came to call fan belts, one POW told his debriefer.
Fidel placed POWs awaiting interrogation in cells next to his torture room, to make sure they heard their predecessor's screams. He threw POWs he had just finished torturing with new roommates, so they saw the results.
``Fidel could get you squirming without even touching you, former Zoo POW Robert Daughtry told The Herald. A debriefer quoted one POW as saying, ``Anticipation of beatings became more of a threat than actual beatings. Nervous to the point of loosening of bowels when heard the key in the lock.
One by one, the POWs gave way before Fidel.
By Christmas 1967, all but one had been tortured into ``surrendering'' -- which meant any sign of submission that Fidel arbitrarily set, from bowing to a Vietnamese guard to accepting an unwanted cigarette or making written or tape-recorded statements that could be used by the North Vietnamese propaganda machine.
Some of the 10 were still beaten occasionally -- ``just a reminder, to keep us in line, Bomar said -- but they received better meals, more mail and more time in the sunlight, outside their dark and bug-infested cells.
A confident Fidel began to select a second group of 10 POWs in January 1968. One, aware of Fidel's reputation, ``surrendered'' swiftly. Two others won the POWs' admiration by engaging Fidel in conversations that averted torture.
But then Fidel ran into Jim Kasler, sent to The Zoo after withstanding tortures at another prison, and Earl Cobeil, a Navy F-105 pilot who acted crazy and may indeed have suffered a head injury when he was shot down.
Fidel's monthlong beatings of Kasler were ``among the worst sieges of torture any American withstood in Hanoi, the book Honor Bound said. Fidel flogged him ``until his buttocks, lower back and legs hung in shreds, and at the end he was in a semi-coma. He eventually recovered.
Worse still was the onslaught against Cobeil, accused by Fidel of faking his craziness to avoid torture. Bomar recalls Fidel angrily vowing to other POWs, ``I'm going to break this guy in a million pieces.
Bomar recalled that during one all-day torture session in May 1968, ``Fidel took a length of black rubber hose . . . and lashed it as hard as he could into the man's face. The prisoner did not react. He did not cry out or even blink.
After a month of almost daily beatings, Bomar told his debriefer, Cobeil ``was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, a dirty, yellowish black-and-purple from head to toe.
Another POW's debriefing said Cobeil ``was beaten to the point where he was incapable of surrender. Was completely catatonic. He was later transferred out of The Zoo and is listed as having died in captivity.
By July 1968, Fidel appeared to have grown frustrated, flying into rages and beating POWs without apparent purpose. He was seen drunk around the camp, and complained of worsening liver problems.
Fidel, Chico and Garcia, also nicknamed ``Pancho,'' a fat, always sloppily dressed man in his mid-30s who had arrived at the camp around June, suddenly vanished in mid-August, never to be seen again by the POWs.
By the end of the Cuba Program, Fidel had tortured 18 of the 20 POWs selected for the Cuba Program. Two apparently were never beaten. All but Cobeil had ``submitted.''
ENGLISH INSTRUCTORS?
A Vietnamese version of Cubans' presence cited Fidel left behind a crucial question: What had been the goal of the Cuba Program?
DPMO analyst Robert Destatte, in an e-mail message written July 2, 1996, reported that he had received one answer from two Vietnamese colonels he interviewed in 1992 as part of his research.
``According to the Vietnamese, . . . the Cubans sent a team of three English-language instructors to provide instruction in basic English to [North Vietnamese army] personnel working with American prisoners, Destatte wrote.
``At the working level, the three Cubans persuaded their Vietnamese colleagues to allow them to demonstrate the effectiveness of Cuban interrogation techniques, he added. ``Information about the mistreatment eventually filtered up to the Vietnamese decision makers and they terminated the . . . program.
``The Vietnamese explanation is plausible and fully consistent with what we know about the conduct of the Cubans, concluded the note, leaked to the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel as it held several hearings on POW and missing-in-action issues in mid-1996.
Destatte presented the same argument to the committee in a closed-door session. But the DPMO's own Cuba Program expert, former POW Chip Beck, later told the committee in open session that it was ``professionally incompetent.
While Fidel and Chico did indeed run English classes for Vietnamese interrogators for a few months, Beck and Fidel's POW victims insist that the Cuba Program was clearly something more than a language class.
Goal of `total surrender'
Foremost among Fidel's goals, they say, was to break the POWs so fully that they would always do his bidding with little need for further torture, instead of the usual rounds of torture-surrender, torture-surrender.
``Fidel's aim was to convince us that absolute and total surrender was the only possible outcome. He told you that flat out in your first meeting, said Hubbard, a 29-year-old B-66 navigator when he was captured.
One POW debriefer wrote: ``Once the prisoner surrendered, he remained submissive, as the [torture] experience was so memorable and painful that he did not care to repeat it.
The book Honor Bound notes that unlike Vietnamese interrogators, the Cubans ``relied on more controlled and orchestrated mingling of physical torture and psychological pressures, suggesting that theirs was a more conscious experimental program with an emphasis as much on assessing the efficacy of tactics as on achieving results.
Some victims of the Cuba Program suspect it was also designed to select candidates for ``early release -- prisoners who could be counted on to make statements favorable to North Vietnam once freed.
Still others believe Fidel was searching for POWs who would agree to participate in a conference in Havana, which took place six weeks after he disappeared from The Zoo, on the U.S. ``genocidal war in Vietnam.
``He wanted a few tamed POWs he could bring to this propaganda extravaganza, former POW Benge said. Some of the ``confessions signed by POWs at The Zoo were in fact made public at the Havana conference, he added.
WHO WERE TORTURERS?
They didn't acknowledge any role as Castro agents The other major question left unanswered when Fidel, Chico and Garcia walked out of The Zoo in 1968 was their real identity.
Long before Destatte's e-mail message confirmed they were Cubans, the POWs who suffered at their hands had concluded that they were agents of Fidel Castro's government, although the trio never admitted that directly.
Bomar, who came up with the nickname Fidel, recalled that a Vietnamese guard once referred to him as ``Cuba, and that Chico had once slipped and told a POW that ``Fidel'' used to pilot a small plane over Havana.
``Fidel'' spoke knowledgeably about Cuba's sugar crops and Che Guevara, and a POW once found a lapel pin in the shape of Cuba on the floor of a prison bathroom.
More intriguing are hints that Fidel may have lived in the United States for a significant period.
His command of American slang and swear words was almost native-born, and his knowledge of U.S. cars up to 1956 models, especially Fords, was astounding, said Bomar, who raced stock cars before he was sent to Vietnam.
Fidel seemed to have personal knowledge of many cities in the southeastern United States, from Miami to the Carolinas, Hubbard said, and knew enough about U.S. paratrooper terminology and tactics to make many POWs suspect he had attended a U.S. Army course at Fort Benning, Ga.
No solid identification
Based on such slim evidence, U.S. intelligence agencies launched an intensive campaign in 1973 to try to identify Fidel and his cohorts. An Air Force report dated June 14, 1973, lists some of the efforts:
The National Security Agency produced the names of all Cubans known to have traveled to North Vietnam in the 1960s. POWs were shown ``the entire CIA photographic holdings of Cuban personalities. The Defense Intelligence Agency checked the list of pre-Castro Cuban military officers who received U.S. military training. But the searches proved fruitless, even after some of the POWs were sent to police and military artists, who sketched eight portraits of Fidel alone, based on the POWs' descriptions.
Hubbard said he and two other POW investigators spent a week in Miami in early 1974, trolling Little Havana restaurants and bars for any exiles who might have heard anything about Cubans in Vietnam.
An FBI agent visited Hubbard in 1979 to show him a half-dozen surveillance photographs of a Cuban Education Ministry official who had just toured Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and returned to Havana.
``If you replaced some hair and took 20 to 25 pounds off, it very easily could have been this guy, Hubbard told The Herald.
Hubbard could not recall the man's name, but documents declassified by the DPMO identified the visitor as Fernando Vecino Alegret, today Cuba's minister of higher education. A military specialist in anti-aircraft defenses in the 1960s, he is known to have visited North Vietnam around 1967.
DPMO documents declassified for the 1996 congressional hearings noted that there had been several other ``possible and ``unconfirmed identifications of Fidel, although none amounted to more than passing mentions.
Speculation on names
An Air Force intelligence report in 1973 mentioned ``Cacillio Moss or ``Moller. A 1976 Defense Intelligence Agency report mentioned ``Luis Perez Jaen. A congressional report in 1992 referred to ``Eduardo Morejon Estevez or ``Morjon Esievez.
Benge believes it might be Raul Valdez Vivo, Cuba's ambassador to North Vietnam in the 1960s and author of a 1990 book about Cuba's involvement in the Vietnam War, The Great Secret: Cubans on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The book makes no mention of torturing American POWs.
``I'm not sure it's him, but if he's not, he must know who it was, said Benge, a civilian U.S. Agency for International Development employee captured in South Vietnam who spent five years as a POW, including 27 months in solitary confinement.
``Some people have forgotten these atrocities. Some want to forget, said Benge, now an AID employee in Washington still battling the CIA, DPMO and DIA to declassify more documents on the Cuba Program. ``I don't forget.
Bomar would also like to find Fidel, if not for revenge, at least to end his flashbacks to Hanoi, circa 1967.
``I wake up at night and I am in a situation back there,'' he said. ``Sometimes I am trying to bail out of my airplane, or sometimes it might be Fidel there, waiting to hammer me.
DPMO investigator Chip Beck put it another way in an e-mail to Destatte just days before he left the DPMO in 1996 and went public with complaints that the agency was concealing reports of Cuban, Chinese and Soviet involvement in POW tortures.
``The Cubans have never been adequately held to task, Beck wrote. ``As long as we remain, I hate to say it, but, smug in our opinion that we know all that happened, we will continue to fool ourselves at the same time as the intelligence apparatus of these countries continue to fool us.
e-mail: jtamayo@herald.com
INSIGHT magazine | October 12. 2001 | Paul Crespo
In the rush to pursue terrorists in far-flung places such as Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf region, let’s not overlook another terrorist on our doorstep — Cuba’s Fidel Castro, a dictator with a bankrupt economy, a long history of ties to terror groups, hatred for the United States and a bio-warfare capability.
In 1959 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.
Castro’s myriad of agents operating in the United States include a military-spy ring known as the “Wasp” network, recently uncovered in Miami. That group had a dramatic addition on Sept. 22 with the arrest in Washington of a senior U.S. intelligence officer — the Cuba analyst for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. She is the highest-ranking officer ever accused of spying for Castro and had considerable input into recent Defense Department reports minimizing the Cuba threat.
Some argue that the aging Castro now is more interested in the tourism trade than the terror business, but this is a dangerous delusion; he is interested in both. Castro may be less active, but Cuba still is one of seven nations (along with Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea and Sudan) on the State Department’s list of terrorist states. This status is well deserved. In 2000, the State Department reported, “Cuba continued to provide safe haven to several terrorists and U.S. fugitives.” Afghan nationals detained in the Cayman Islands in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks reportedly transited through Cuba; two others detained in Panama for their possible financial connection to Osama bin Laden’s terror network reportedly were en route to Cuba.
Castro never has wavered in his ideological rampage against the United States, even as he has wooed Western investors. Recently he has been organizing a new “anti-Western alliance” of rogue states (including Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela). In 2001 Castro visited Libya six times. As recently as May 2001 Castro toured Syria, Libya and Iran to garner support for this effort. On May 10 in Tehran, Castro stated, “Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees.”
The intelligence threat posed by Castro is real. He reportedly supplied intelligence on U.S. military activities to Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War — information gained through Cuba’s Soviet-built, Russian-financed signals-intelligence facility in Lourdes capable of eavesdropping on phone calls in Washington and from spies in the United States. The Russians pay him more than $200 million a year in much-needed hard currency for access to his intelligence. We can only speculate how much bin Laden and Iraq may be paying.
The Chinese also have built an electronic-espionage complex in Bejucal, Cuba, operating under the cover of “Radio China.” The Federal Communications Commission has stated that the Chinese are capable of interfering with U.S. communications and air-traffic control. On May 13, the Chinese reportedly sent a message to New York air-traffic control falsely identifying themselves as a U.S. military transport plane — a chilling foretaste of things to come.
More worrisome is Castro’s potential chemical- and biological-weapons development and proliferation. He long has been suspected of hiding a chemical/biological-weapons program within his sophisticated, Soviet-created “biotechnology” industry.
In May 1998, secretary of defense William Cohen testified before Congress that Cuba possessed advanced biotechnology and was capable of mass-producing agents for biological warfare. High-level Cuban defectors, as well as Col. Ken Alibek, former deputy chief of the former Soviet Union’s biological-warfare program, support that assessment. Castro also may be exporting this capability to his rogue friends. In 2000, Cuban officials inaugurated a new “biotech-research” plant near Tehran.
Castro’s continued anti-American fervor, close intelligence links to rogue states and terrorists, and bio-warfare capability make him a dangerous neighbor.
What should the United States do? First we should clearly tell China and Russia that we no longer will allow Cuba to be used as an intelligence-collection or subversion site against the United States and demand they withdraw their advisers and technicians immediately. At minimum we also should demand that Castro shut down these facilities and allow for independent inspection and verification.
We also should demand to inspect all suspected chemical/biological-research (weapons) sites on the island. Finally, we should redouble and refocus our intelligence efforts to verify and confirm the details of Cuban complicity with terrorist groups, and we should tell Castro in no uncertain terms that we will not tolerate Cuba being used as a haven for international terrorists. Castro is a player in this global terrorist network and should be treated as such.
Paul Crespo, a former Marine Corps combat-arms and intelligence officer, served as a naval attaché in the Balkans, Persian Gulf and Latin America. He is a counterterrorism consultant and a member of the Council on Emerging National Security Affairs in Washington.
Government News Keywords: CASTRO, BIOLOGICAL WARFARE,
RUSSIAN LISTENING POST, EXPORTING ARMED REVOLUTION, CLINTON OK
Source: Insight Magazine/Washington Times-via another website
Published: By Martin Arostegui Author: Vol 14, No 26 July 20, 1998
Posted on 04/29/2000 08:04:00 PDT by Bronco Buster
The Cuban dictator is devoting a lot of his destitute island nation's budget to secretive biological- and chemical-weapons research. Will he share his germ arsenal with terrorists?
Not far from Havana's picturesque harbor, where ogling tourists and curvaceous prostitutes ply Cuba's only thriving form of free trade, stands the Luis Diaz Soto Naval Hospital, flanked by a newly built concrete laboratory complex about 400 feet long by 300 feet wide.
Inside the compound, along a 165-foot acid-resistant work table with built-in circuit breakers, military biotechnicians reportedly experiment on cadavers, hospital patients and live animals with anthrax, brucellosis, equine encephalitis, dengue fever, hepatitis, tetanus and a variety of other bacterial agents.
Five chemical- and biological-weapons plants operate throughout the island, according to documents smuggled out of Cuba and made available to Insight by Alvaro Prendes, a former Cuban air force colonel who now is the Miami-based spokesman for the Union of Liberated Soldiers and Officers, a clandestine pro-democracy movement within Cuba's security services.
The credibility of the smuggled documents is enhanced by a recent classified Pentagon analysis. Also, these facilities have not been on the itinerary of such visiting dignitaries as retired Marine Gen. John Sheehan, the recently passed-over candidate for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who enthusiastically embraced normalizing relations with Havana following a recent round of junketing with Castro.
Pentagon, State Department and congressional sources also point to continuing Cuban support for international terrorism and drug trafficking. They tell Insight that, according to the CIA, Russian specialists still operate the electronic listening station at Lourdes on the northeast tip of the island which taps into U.S. communications. During the Persian Gulf War, this station forwarded strategic information to Iraq.
Reports smuggled out this year by dissident Cuban military officers and scientists are believed to be among the factors prompting Defense Secretary William Cohen to revise a Pentagon report sent to Congress last April which decertified Cuba as a threat to U.S. national security.
The revised report, still classified but made available to an Insight reporter, states: "Cuba's air force is in disrepair and much of the regular army is demobilized, but the Castro government retains the potential to pose unconventional threats. It has the infrastructure which can be adapted to the production of chem-bio weapons."
A classified annex to the Pentagon's final report to Congress further warns: "According to sources within Cuba, at least one research site is run and funded by the Cuban military to work on the development of offensive and defensive biological weapons."
Why does the president ignore this? "Clinton just wants to avoid another front," says Ernesto Betancourt, former director of Radio Marti, a U.S. government broadcasting service. Betancourt believes that the administration is terrified of provoking a confrontation which could lead to another Cuban wave of refugees.
"While maintaining the economic embargo to placate Cuban-American voters, Clinton desperately avoids making waves with Castro," Betancourt adds.
"The administration has been asleep at the switch on China, India and very possibly now on Cuba," Chairman Dan Burton of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee tells Insight. "They are simply not on the ball."
Moreover, former U.S. ambassador to Colombia Lewis Tambs has the same concern: "If we cannot prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in our backyard, how can we hope to do so halfway around the world?"
Although Clinton has been sufficiently concerned about the general threat of chemical and biological terrorism triggering an internal domestic crisis by setting up a series of new response measures -- including expanded storage of antidotes, stepped-up inoculations of military personnel and a call for $250 million to train first-responder teams at state and local levels -- he appears to be taking no action against Castro.
According to the documents obtained by Insight, Castro initiated his chemical-weapons program in 1981 when Soviet technicians built a plant to produce tricothecen, the main component of "yellow rain," in an underground tunnel complex at Quimonor in Matanzas province.
The program was expanded some years later with the construction of another chemical-weapons facility in Pinar del Rio, where Cuban and Soviet technicians began experimenting with mixtures of germs and toxins to produce anthrax, the documents assert.
Drastic cutbacks in Russian subsidies and military aid to Cuba did not dissuade Castro from further expanding his development of germ warfare. According to Betancourt, classified CIA reports dating back to 1989 describe Cuban efforts to acquire technology and equipment to manufacture biological weapons.
The exile reports back this up: While Cuba's economy collapsed, Dr. Maria del Pilar y Gloria de la Campa, a biochemist and Politburo member on Castro's presidential staff -- whose real name is Gladys Llanusa -- made repeated trips to Europe, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union to arrange related purchases, these reports say.
A centrifugal reactor capable of 10,000 revolutions per minute, used to separate biological microorganisms from solid and liquid substances, was acquired through Comicondor, an Italian company in Milan which also supplies technology to Libya for Col. Muammar Qaddafi's biological-weapons experiments.
Cuba's chemical- and biological-weapons production is administered through a network of state-controlled biogenetic industries operated by interlocking front companies linked to the Defense and Interior ministries.
Manuel Cereijo, a professor of electronic engineering at Florida International University in Miami who has debriefed more than 300 Cuban scientists, estimates that from an original investment of $1.6 million in 1980, Cuba's biogenetic industry has grown into a $2 billion-a-year venture.
"This unprecedented level of investment is comparable with the biotechnologies of the most advanced industrial countries in Europe and the United States. It's out of all proportion to Cuba's small and bankrupt economy which is desperately undeveloped in all other areas," Cereijo says.
Eleven biochemical plants currently are operating in Cuba, half of which are believed to serve military purposes, according to the Florida professor. With the exception of some cattle inoculants, very little vaccine is being produced for medical or commercial purposes, his sources say.
The Prendes documents explain: The two newest laboratories, built near military installations on the east side of Havana Bay have started operating during the last five years. The largest facility, located 100 meters from the naval hospital, was completed in late 1993 and inaugurated in April 1994, while another began functioning in early 1995 close to the J. Finlay military hospital.
These plants are supervised closely by a military-scientific coordinating body composed of top army and intelligence officers. They include former armed-forces chief of staff Gen. Ulises Rosales del Toro and counterintelligence chief Col. Librado Reina Benitan.
Another officer with an extensive track record in special operations, Gen. Julio Casas Regueiro, also is supervising the project, as are two personal deputies to Defense Minister Raul Castro (a Col. Alonso and a Brig. Gen. Milian) and the chief of investments for the armed forces, Lt. Col. Sergio Sanchez.
According to Cuban sources with personal access to the project's rec-ords, a team of specialists in strategic military construction, carefully vetted by Cuban counterintelligence, carried out much of the construction and installation.
The Italian-manufactured centrifugal plant and other laboratory equipment were transported to Cuba in 1993 onboard a Panama-registered vessel crewed by carefully selected Cuban naval personnel.
Records indicate the ship, the Cristina Amary, previously used for sensitive cargo, is leased to front companies operated by the Cuban military intelligence, Cubanacan S.A. and Cimex, which intelligence experts say channel financial proceeds from tourism and other state-run enterprises into military operations.
The intelligence sources also maintain that accounting records for the lab's construction are meticulously covered up through authorized funding for extensions to existing medical facilities and the remodeling of Havana's historical El Morro Fortress.
"The extensive covert arrangements indicate plans to use the material produced in the plants in an offensive capacity or for genocidal purposes to eliminate centers of antigovernment unrest," says Col. Prendes, who was a Cuban top gun and chief air-defense strategist before being forced into exile in 1994 when he called upon Castro to resign.
SS-22 medium-range missiles acquired from the Soviet Union in 1990 are installed at coastal batteries near the most recently built laboratories, according to the colonel. Within easy striking range of Florida, these missiles could be armed with chemical or biological warheads.
Rather than using conventional military delivery systems, however, more insidious methods are being tested to infect civilian communities.
Experiments are reported to be underway in the use of insects, rats and even house pets as contaminants. Cuba's biowarfare technicians also have developed tetanus-carrying antipersonnel mines in the form of easily built, low-explosive devices armed with infected needles.
These small and inexpensive booby traps reportedly are being used for perimeter security around forced-labor camps, underground sources report from Cuba.
Deliveries of biological weapons also could be facilitated through the numerous terrorist and Mafia organizations keeping close ties to Havana.
According to Tambs, "There is no doubt about continuing Cuban support for the the National Liberation Army and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in their alliance with major drug-trafficking cartels to topple the Colombian government."
Cuba's support for terrorism is widespread. Spain's Interior Minister, Jaime Mayor Oreja, despite his country's important investments in Cuba, accuses Havana of providing asylum and intelligence support to Basque separatist ETA terrorists.
And the State Department is worked up about recent reports indicating Cuban involvement with guerrillas of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Mexico. All these are potential markets for Cuba's chemical and biological weapons.
"We are producing medicines, not weapons," insists a spokesman for the Cuban interests section in Washington, who claims to be head of the unit but does not give his name. "We deny the Pentagon's charges of offensive potential in our biogenetic industry," he says.
A State Department official who says he is uncomfortable about the subject of Cuban biochemical weapons -- and asks not to be named -- nonetheless says for the record, "Any evidence that Castro could manufacture biological weapons is strictly circumstantial. We don't see much indication that he is doing it."
The U.S. official points to the embargo of Cuba as an effective means to curtail the communist island nation's biochemical research, citing a recent example in which a British company seeking to enter into joint biogenetic ventures with the Cuban government was blocked by U.S. sanctions, due to partial ownership of the company by U.S. citizens. "We are keeping an eye on it," he says reassuringly.
"These labs operated by the Cuban military and interior ministries are highly secure and off-limits to foreigners and visiting scientists," Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen warned in a recent House speech.
While she and other members of Congress have called for on-site inspections of the Cuban facilities, State Department officials believe "it would be very tricky. The Cubans could claim the right to inspect our industries. Getting the U.N. involved would be very difficult."
"A factor which must be considered is the deeply sadistic and psychotic nature of Castro's personality," says Prendes, who has known him personally since serving as one of his ace pilots in repelling the 1961 CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion.
"He is determined to hold on to power until the very end, to take everyone down with him." And Castro's eight-hour speeches still are punctuated by apocalyptic rhetoric:
"Communism or death. ... After me comes the deluge. ... The last wish of a revolutionary is to pull the trigger against his enemy, explode a land mine."
How ruthless is Castro? Would he actually use these weapons of mass extermination?
Consider:
Among the long line of distinguished foreign visitors who have enjoyed the opportunity of being hosted and entertained by Cuba's Maximum Leader, some have been surprised to discover that he is an avid herpetophile, or reptile lover.
A multimillionaire Spanish entrepreneur and mayor of a luxurious resort city who regularly visits Cuba and is on first-name terms with Fidel recently told an Insight reporter that he never will forget being shown around the last true socialist's private game preserve at Guahnacabiles, occupying an entire peninsula in the western part of Pinar del Rio. While touring the lush paradise, he was amazed to come upon a massive snake farm attended by military personnel.
Castro explained that this is where he breeds a deadly viper discovered by his troops in Angola -- a snake which can kill a human instantly.
Dissident sources often have reported that these poisonous snakes are used as guards by Castro's security men. They anchor the snakes to stakes using long tethers as if they were prison guard dogs. Few prisoners dare even try to escape.
So impressed was the mayor by Castro's Jurassic Park ruthlessness that Fidel sent him a baby snake as a birthday gift. It was returned to sender.
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