Castro's Connections

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

***
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).

"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."

Castro found a home/mother with the Soviet America...DNC--Devilcrats/reno!

Castro has been assisting any group or nation that opposes the United States. He tends to try to advance communism, but will support any anti-US movement. Allied with China and Chavez in Venzuela, he is in a position to deal us plenty of grief.

This is why I am so concerned with the laid back policy and actual negligence of our Southern border. It has become so widely known that our border is a sieve, that every terrorist in the world that wants to get into the US for evil reasons knows where to go.

If we don't close this hole in our defense, we will see terrorism that will make 9/11 look mild. But yet, our administration seems rather bored if not hostile to any further improvement in our border security.

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