Date: 01 Mar 96 09:40:16 EST
From: Jon Flanders <72763.2240-AT-compuserve.com>
Subject: Cuba and CIA


I got a big kick out of this story! Those damn Cubans!
 Jon Flanders

 Cuban Infiltration of the Exiles

 By TIM WEINER

 c.1996 N.Y. Times News Service

 WASHINGTON - No one should have been shocked when a trusted pilot for
 Brothers to the Rescue, the anti-Castro organization whose planes were shot
down last week, showed up on Cuban television denouncing the group as a tool
of the CIA.

 Cuba's spy service has infiltrated the exile groups of Miami for more than 30
years, compromising and sometimes controlling their work. The chief of
operations of one of the most militant groups secretly reported to Fidel
Castro for a decade. Dozens of Cubans recruited by the CIA during the Cold War
were double agents in the pay of Havana and Moscow. Some may still be.

 Cuba might be a poor, politically isolated island whose people scrape by on
rice, beans, and slogans. But its spy service is ``one of the most
 sophisticated, agile, and effective'' in the world, in the words of Juan
 Armando Montes, a retired U.S. Army special-forces colonel. It is a
 particularly sharp thorn in the side of the CIA, which has been bedeviled and
bamboozled by Castro, his agents, and double agents ever since the Bay of Pigs
fiasco in 1961 - an operation fatally compromised by infiltrators.

 Hundreds of spies from Cuba's Direccion General de Inteligencia, the DGI,
 live and work in the United States, according to former members of the Cuban
service who have defected. They operate as diplomats and cab drivers, dealers
of guns, drugs, and information. They thrive in embassies - a sizable
contingent of the Cuban delegation to the United Nations does cloak-and-dagger
work, U.S. officials say - and in the bars and restaurants of the Little
Havana section of Miami.

 Among their ranks, U.S. officials believe, was Juan Pablo Roque, the dashing
pilot who defected - or rather, re-defected - to Cuba from the ranks of
Brothers to the Rescue.

 ``One has to assume that he is a Cuban agent,'' Undersecretary of State Peter
Tarnoff said of Roque. He was also an informer for the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, which paid him $6,720 for inside information on Cuban exiles.
In this classic double agent scheme, Cuban intelligence used Roque to
manipulate the FBI, to try to gain insight into the bureau's operations and to
undermine the exile groups. Incidentally, the CIA flatly denies any
present-day ties to the members of Brothers to the Rescue.

 Roque is far from the first member of a Cuban exile group to suddenly reveal
his links to Havana. The Cuban intelligence service, which reports to Defense
Minister Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, has infiltrated the exile groups and
U.S. government agencies with notable success.

 Take the case of Jose Rafael Fernandez Brenes, who jumped ship from a Cuban
merchant vessel in 1988 and quickly landed a federal job. From 1988 to 1991,
he helped set up and run TV Marti, the U.S. government-financed station that
beams anti-Castro information and propaganda at Cuba. The Cuban government
jammed TV Marti's signal the moment it went on the air in March 1990 - thanks
in no small part to the frequencies and technical data supplied by Fernandez
Brenes.

 Then there was Francisco Avila Azcuy, who ran operations for Alpha 66, one of
the most violent anti-Castro exile groups, all the while reporting secretly to
the FBI and Cuban intelligence. Avila planned a 1981 raid on Cuba, telling
both the FBI and the DGI all about it. His information helped convict seven
members of Alpha 66 for violating the Neutrality Act by planning an attack on
a foreign nation from U.S. soil. He also informed on the personal lives and
tastes of 40 top anti-Castro leaders.

 The most disturbing news about Cuban spies came from Maj. Florentino
 Aspillaga, a DGI officer who defected to the United States in 1987. He
 contended that most, if not all, of the Cuban agents recruited by the CIA
 from the mid-1960s onward were doubles - pretending to be loyal to the United
States while working in secret for Havana. Four years later, CIA analysts and
counterintelligence officers glumly concluded that the major was telling the
truth.

 This meant not only that much of what the agency knew about Cuba was wrong,
but also that a great deal of what Cuba knew about the CIA was right.

 The agency long ago cut its ties to most of the Cuban exiles in Miami. But
the legacy of the Bay of Pigs, when the agency sent thousands of Cubans off in
a doomed plot to overthrow Castro, lives on in the exile groups still trying
to finish that mission.




  E-mail from: Jonathan E. Flanders, 01-Mar-1996




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