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EDITOR'S NOTE: On
Tuesday, March 19, a high-level Defense Intelligence Agency analyst
pleaded guilty to espionage on behalf of Fidel Castro's Cuba. Ana
Belen Montes was arrested last September, and now has told officials
that she spied for 16 years, starting in 1985. She did not receive
compensation for her services, but volunteered them because of her
strong opposition to U.S. policy toward Cuba. In the November 5,
2001 issue of NR, John J. Miller described the Montes case
in detail, as well as the underappreciated problem of Cuban espionage
in the United States and its links to international terrorism.
  ttención!
Attención!" snaps the female voice in Spanish at the
start of each broadcast. To all but a few listeners, the message
that follows is perfectly unintelligible: a long series of seemingly
random numbers that drone on for 50 minutes. Just about anybody
with a shortwave radio can hear them several times a day at various
frequencies, though their intended audience is small. To these few
recipients, however, they make exquisite and terrible sense —
because they are spies in the service of Fidel Castro's Cuba.
It's not clear
how often Ana Belen Montes tuned in to these so-called numbers stations,
but there's little doubt that she did or that some of the signals
were sent specifically for her. FBI agents on a search warrant last
May sneaked into her apartment and checked the hard drive of a laptop
computer she kept there. They found sequences matching those that
had been broadcast previously, instructions on how to run them through
a decryption program that turns the numbers into words, and messages
she traded with Cuban spymasters.
On September
21, agents arrested Montes at the Defense Intelligence Agency's
headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., where
she worked as the DIA's top Cuba expert. Assuming the charges against
her are true — she won't enter a plea before November 5 —
Montes's actions probably will go down as the Cuban intelligence
service's most spectacular penetration of the U.S. national-security
apparatus. Montes had access to highly classified information and
regularly briefed policymakers on matters involving Cuba. If Havana
had been given a choice about where it would most like to place
a spy, the sensitive DIA post held by Montes certainly would have
made the short list.
How badly Montes
damaged U.S. interests remains an open question. She surely doesn't
rank with the Soviet Union's two deadliest American spies, Aldrich
Ames and Robert Hanssen, even though their lawyers, Plato Cacheris
and Preston Burton, now represent her. An FBI affidavit says she
blew the cover of at least one agent (who survived the betrayal)
and delivered "information relating to the national defense
of the United States, with the intent and reason to believe that
the information was to be used to the injury of the United States
and to the advantage of Cuba." Yet Montes is only part of a
bigger problem — a broad espionage effort waged by Cuba against
the United States that has brought death to Americans. There's even
a startling connection between Cuba and the September 11 terrorist
strikes.
The
Montes Penetration
As the Cold War recedes into history, there's been a growing suspicion
that the United States takes the Cuban threat too seriously —
and specifically that Cuba policy is "held hostage" to
an outspoken minority of Florida swing voters. New evidence from
the Montes case and elsewhere, however, strongly suggests that we
haven't been treating the Cuban threat seriously enough.
If September
11 had been just another day, Montes probably would still be at
large — and under the close watch of FBI agents. They only
began to investigate her in May, acting on information whose source
and nature remain undisclosed. They followed Montes around Washington
all summer as she embarked on numerous roundabout journeys to pay
phones, where — it is believed — she communicated with
her handlers. Agents rummaged around her apartment twice and found
additional proof linking her to Cuban intelligence. Normally the
FBI does not pounce after only a few months of surveillance —
sometimes it waits for years as it quietly builds a case against
a spy and patiently tries to discover the identities of her contacts.
Yet the FBI moved against Montes with unusual speed, taking her
into custody less than two weeks after the terrorist attacks. The
possibility that she would pass along vital information to the Cubans,
who then might share it with America's other enemies, was a risk
not worth taking.
Montes started
working at DIA in 1985, and was assigned to Cuba seven years later.
The FBI believes she's been a spy since at least the fall of 1996.
She's tall and slender, looking a bit younger than her 44 years.
Plenty of Cuba experts know Montes from attending her briefings
or sitting with her at other meetings, such as those sponsored by
Georgetown University's Caribbean Project. In public she was reserved,
as intelligence officers are prone to be, but behind closed doors
she left distinct impressions. "She was a severe person, a
hard-edged person," recalls Richard Nuccio, a Cuba adviser
in the Clinton White House. She was also well known for advocating
a softened Cuba policy — to the point where at least two people
with links to intelligence had expressed concern over her views
long before anybody questioned her loyalty. Her motivation for spying
remains a mystery: The FBI affidavit says nothing about payments.
By all appearances she lived modestly, fighting her landlord over
tenant dues and driving a Toyota Echo. She is of Puerto Rican heritage.
And there don't seem to be any obvious expressions of Communist
sympathy in her past.
After her arrest,
an important 1998 DIA report — suggesting that Cuba no longer
poses much of a strategic threat to the United States — was
immediately called into question. As the DIA's senior Cuba specialist,
Montes would have exercised a major influence over the final product.
When the report was completed, in fact, defense secretary William
Cohen considered it too weak. He toughened the language, though
not to the extent Castro's strongest critics would have liked. The
broader problem with the report, however, is that it reflects the
views of the foreign-policy establishment, which continues to downplay
Cuba. Castro has "done good things for his people," said
secretary of state Colin Powell at an April 26 House hearing. "He's
no longer the threat he was."
It's true that
ever since the Soviet Union quit its role as patron, Cuba has suffered
from chronic cash shortages, and it desperately relies on the tourist
dollars of Canadian and European vacationers. Yet it does continue
to pose a significant threat. Castro maintains the ability to spark
a migration crisis whenever he wants, and Cuba is a money-laundering
magnet. Even more worrisome is Cuba's biological-weapons capability.
Castro may not be willing to provide his people with aspirin, but
he has invested heavily in a biotechnology infrastructure with frightful
capabilities. José de la Fuente, a top Cuban scientist who
escaped the island by boat in 1999, said recently that Castro's
minions know how to manufacture anthrax bacteria and the smallpox
virus.
Then there's
the espionage. By using an agent such as Montes to influence threat
assessments, Havana may hope to build support for ending the U.S.
economic embargo. A less menacing Cuba, after all, is a more attractive
trading partner. A House vote on lifting the embargo drew 201 votes
earlier this year — a failure, but tantalizingly close to success.
A more direct
benefit from Montes involved specific knowledge of U.S. contingency
planning — in other words, secret information on how the American
government intends to respond to potential crisis situations. Shortly
before Montes observed a war-games exercise put on by the U.S. Atlantic
Command in Norfolk, Va., for instance, she received this message
from Cuba: "Everything that takes place there will be of intelligence
value. Let's see if it deals with contingency plans and specific
targets in Cuba, which are prioritized interests for us." This
type of knowledge helps Cuba understand how much it can provoke
the U.S. without suffering consequences. What would happen, for
instance, if it encouraged a throng of women and children to climb
the fences at the Guantánamo Bay naval base? Or if it tried
to spark a new Mariél boatlift incident?
Blasted
From the Skies
If Montes represents one major prong of Cuban espionage, another
recently has come to light in Miami. Over the last three years,
the government has indicted 16 members of a spy ring called La Red
Avispa, or the Wasp Network. Five admitted involvement following
their arrests, another five were convicted in June, two more pled
guilty in September, and four have fled the country. Just like Montes,
they communicated with Havana by unlocking coded messages received
over shortwave radios. The Wasp Network did just about everything,
from counting takeoffs at a Key West airbase to attempting the penetration
of military facilities. Their most successful operation, however,
involved the infiltration of anti-Castro exile groups. "The
Miami community is heavily penetrated," says Mark Falcoff,
a Latin Americanist at the American Enterprise Institute. "It's
full of provocateurs who try to embarrass and discredit Cuban-Americans.
We saw them out in full force during the Elián González
controversy."
Some of the
Wasp Network's deeds were relatively modest, such as making hostile
phone calls to Miami Herald editors in the name of anti-Castro
groups; the point was to create tension between the press and certain
Cuban-American leaders. Other actions, however, were monstrous.
Two members, René González (code name: Castor) and
Juan Pablo Roque (code name: German), succeeded in joining Brothers
to the Rescue, an organization that flies private planes over the
Florida Straits in search of people fleeing Cuba in rickety rafts.
Once inside the group, they obtained closely held flight schedules,
which they passed along to Wasp Network leader Gerardo Hernandez.
He transmitted these to Havana in early 1996. Cuba then sent back
an order: "Under no circumstances should agents German or Castor
fly with BTTR or another organization on days 24, 25, 26, and 27."
They didn't — and on February 24, 1996, three planes piloted
by the Brothers departed on one of their humanitarian missions.
There's been some dispute over whether they actually entered Cuban
airspace, but none over the fundamental fact of what happened that
day: A Cuban MiG jet destroyed two of the planes, killing four people.
A week after the shootdown, Cuban intelligence sent its Miami agents
a congratulatory message through a numbers station: "We have
dealt the Miami Right a hard blow, in which your role has been decisive."
They called their murderous effort "Operation Scorpion."
Some have speculated
that one of the captured Wasp Network spies provided federal agents
with the information that led them to Montes. This seems unlikely.
"The Cuban intelligence service is one of the best in the world,"
says a former CIA official. They almost certainly would have built
firewalls between Montes and the Wasp Network. Yet it's difficult
to keep all their efforts completely compartmentalized.
What makes
Cuban espionage especially troubling now is the Castro regime's
longstanding support of terrorism. Cuba is one of the seven countries
on the State Department's terrorism list. It may not compare to
Iraq or the Taliban, but its indulgence of terrorists is beyond
dispute. Last year, Cuba was the only country attending the Ibero-American
Summit in Panama that refused to join a condemnation of terrorism.
This spring, Castro toured Libya, Syria, and Iran. At Tehran University
on May 10, the dictator declared, "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation
with each other, can bring America to its knees. The U.S. regime
is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up."
Some 20 fugitives
from American justice currently call Cuba home, including Victor
Gerena, who pulled off a $7 million bank robbery in Connecticut
in 1983 as a member of the terrorist group Los Macheteros. He's
currently on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, and much of what he
stole is believed to have made its way to Cuba in diplomatic pouches.
Los Macheteros is also responsible for the ambush of a Navy bus
in Puerto Rico that left two sailors dead in 1979 and an attack
on a Puerto Rico Air National Guard base in 1981 that wrecked eleven
planes. Other terrorist links to Cuba involve more recent activities:
On August 11, Colombian officials arrested three members of the
Irish Republican Army as they returned from a part of the country
controlled by the narcoterrorist group FARC. Two were explosives
experts and the third, Niall Connolly, has been identified as Sinn
Fein's Havana representative.
Then there's
the bizarre case of Mohammed Raza Hassani, Nez Nezar Nezary, and
Ali Sha Yusufi — three Afghan men recently detained in the
Cayman Islands. They carried fake Pakistani passports and claimed
to have gotten off a boat bound for Canada from Turkey. The police
commissioner, however, determined that they actually had arrived
by plane from Cuba. They were still in the Caymans on August 29
when a local radio station received an anonymous note saying that
they share an association with Osama bin Laden. three agents are
here organizing a major terrorist act against the U.S. via an airline
or airlines," said the letter. The station gave it to the authorities.
Soon after September 11, they tracked down its author, Byron Barnett,
a local building contractor, who says his note was "pure speculation"
and based on "a premonition." This incident has received
scant attention from the media.
It's a startling
story, perhaps even revelatory; then again, maybe there's nothing
to it apart from amazing coincidence. But what is beyond doubt is
that even though the Wasp Network has been busted and Ana Belen
Montes is under arrest, those Cuban numbers stations continue to
broadcast their coded messages several times each day.
Who is listening
to them?
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