| Subject: |
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Cuban spy tactics |
| Name: |
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John Suarez |
| Date Posted: |
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Jun 22, 02 - 2:39 PM |
| Email: |
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fcf@fiu.edu |
| Website |
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http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf |
| Message: |
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Posted on Sun, Jun. 16, 2002
Infiltration, seduction among Cuban spy tactics in U.S.
BY TIM JOHNSON
tjohnson@herald.com
WASHINGTON - Ana Belen Montes' confession in March brought the latest evidence of how Fidel Castro's regime seeks to spy on the United States, targeting the Cuban exile community, Capitol Hill, the military and CIA, and universities, experts say.
Time after time, Cuba's Directorate of Intelligence has run double agents, letting them fall into U.S. hands, or wash up on U.S. shores, as presumed defectors.
After insinuating themselves into exile groups, Radio Martí or federal agencies, they would sow discord, or bolt back to Havana to publicly discredit the U.S. government.
Cuban spies based in the United States are ''very smooth, very acculturated and really very, very professional,'' one retired counterintelligence official said.
They operate from the Cuban Interests Section in Washington and the huge Cuban mission to the United Nations in New York City, which has more than 70 accredited diplomats.
''I'll just flatly tell you that almost every one of them are intelligence officers,'' the retired official said.
At Cuba's mission in New York City, intelligence gathering is such a principal task, another U.S. official said, that many of the Cuban personnel ``frankly don't even know where the U.N. is.''
By the mid-1970s, Cuban operatives were gathering information not only for Havana but also to pass on to the Soviet spy agency, the KGB.
''The Cubans were much more successful at bringing people aboard and gathering information,'' the official said. ``They were Latin and they were kind of glamorous. We're much more open to Latins than we are to people with steel teeth and a Slavic accent.''
Cuban intelligence agents practice literal and figurative seduction, spending months and even years looking for weak points in their targets, experts say.
''They investigate everything,'' said Francisco Avila, a former Cuban double agent who came clean in 1992 and now lives in South Florida. ``Do you like to smoke? Do you like to fish, hunt? Go to the movies? Or maybe a man is a real womanizer, and they send a woman to seduce him.''
Avila, who was tasked by Cuban intelligence with infiltrating Alpha 66, a Miami exile paramilitary group, voiced amazement at how many Cuban agents penetrated the group.
''One time, I was one of six people aboard a boat belonging to Alpha 66, and I looked around and realized that three of us were from [Cuban] state security,'' Avila said.
Before his break with Havana, Avila said, he would receive instructions in Miami every three months or from a contact, who would give him a large hollowed-out bolt with a paper inside.
The paper would instruct him on how to meet his Cuban intelligence handler in New York City.
'It would say something like, `We'll see each other in Queens at such and such an hour in front of a Kentucky Fried Chicken,' '' Avila said. When Avila would show up there, ''almost always it was the first secretary of the U.N. Interests Section'' waiting for him.
The FBI counterintelligence unit has about 40 to 50 agents nationwide assigned to watch Cuban spies -- not nearly enough to keep tabs on every Cuban diplomat who wanders the streets of New York, Washington and Miami.
''It's not like the movies,'' the security official said.
``You put two people out on somebody and they'll lose him. It's very hard to surveil somebody.''
Cuba in the News 6/22/02 Pt. 3: The Spy Issue
Posted on Fri, Jun. 21, 2002
Spy suspect denies role for Castro
U.S. wants to deport him
BY ALFONSO CHARDY AND LUISA YANEZ
achardy@herald.com
Accused Cuban spy Juan Emilio Aboy on Thursday adamantly denied federal allegations that he was a covert agent for the Fidel Castro government and a member of a Cuban spy ring dismantled by the FBI in Miami four years ago.
''Someone is trying to frame me,'' Aboy, 41, said in his first interview since federal immigration agents arrested him May 30 at his southwest Miami home. ``I never came to this country to spy. Never in my life, did I come here to spy. No one sent me here to spy. The government of Cuba did not send me here to spy. I escaped from Cuba on a boat.''
Aboy, a Soviet-trained military diver in Cuba, spoke at the Krome detention center minutes after appearing at his first major hearing before an immigration judge where attorneys from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service laid out the specific allegations against him.
According to a document in which the INS lists the allegations, Aboy ''engaged in activities to violate a law of the United States, relating to espionage,'' ''failed to register with the attorney general'' as someone trained in espionage and concealed his intent to spy on the United States when he applied for a green card in 1996.
CLOSED HEARING
At the hearing, which was closed to the media, Aboy's attorney -- Grisel Ybarra -- said she denied the allegations and presented what she described as evidence that Aboy did not conceal his Cuban military background from U.S. officials.
''In 1994, when he escaped from Cuba and was interviewed by U.S. officials in Guantanamo six times, he told them who he was,'' Ybarra said after the hearing. She also gave The Herald a copy of Aboy's visa application filled out at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay where he listed his occupation as ``lieutenant marine war/Cuba.''
But Dan Vara, chief legal officer for the INS Miami district, said the relevant issue is that Aboy did not register with the Attorney General as required by law for foreign nationals trained in espionage. Vara also said that Aboy did not tell any U.S. official that he was trained in espionage and that the U.S. government has evidence he was trained in such tactics.
Vara said the INS will disclose specific evidence about Aboy by the next hearing now scheduled for July 23.
Ybarra, Aboy's attorney, said INS told the immigration court that Aboy had been ordered to infiltrate the U.S. Southern Command, which is based in Miami-Dade and serves as military nerve center for the Caribbean and Latin America.
''They told the judge he was a courier for the Wasp Network, who used a cylinder to pass on information and that other spies would testify to that,'' she said.
Aboy, in Thursday's interview, said the only cylinder he ever used was his diving oxygen tank.
WASP NETWORK
The allegation against Aboy, that he failed to register, is similar to charges made against some of the 12 Avispa or Wasp Network members who pleaded guilty or were convicted since the ring was dismantled in 1998.
But in Aboy's case, federal authorities have not charged him criminally and instead of seeking to put him in federal prison, they want him deported.
Federal officials have said that the evidence against Aboy is significant, but not enough for prosecutors to win an espionage conviction.
''We have definitive evidence that Mr. Aboy is an unidentified co-conspirator [in the Avispa network],'' Vara said following a bond hearing Tuesday, adding that the convicted spies would testify against Aboy. He would not elaborate.
But attorneys for some of the convicted spies said spy suspects who struck deals with the government to avoid trial helped prosecutors with the Aboy case.
In the interview Thursday, Aboy said he never met any of the convicted Cuban spy suspects and that his training was for war -- not espionage.
''I was in the navy so therefore I had to know about diving,'' Aboy said.
He added that in 1998, the year the Avispa network was busted, federal agents contacted him and asked whether he knew any of the people who had been arrested.
`WE KNOW'
'I told them, `No, I don't know those guys,' '' Aboy said Thursday. He added that one of the agents told him ``we know you are Gabriel.''
Aboy said he told the agent that he was mistaken, that Gabriel is his 25-year-old son in Cuba.
Aboy, who married in the United States and worked as a diver fixing underwater equipment at military installations and nuclear plants, left Cuba in 1994 on a small boat.
He entered the U.S. in March 1995 and became a permanent resident in 1996.
Distributed by the Free Cuba Foundation
http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/
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