Cuban intelligence

Via AFP:

Cuba’s vast international spy network, considered among the best in the world, will remain intact under the leadership of the new president Raul Castro, intelligence experts say.

Havana will probably even ramp up its information gathering in the months leading up to the November elections seeking to win a firm handle on the policies of the next US president, said Chris Simmons, a former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) counterintelligence Cuba analyst.

“Havana has an insatiable appetite for information about US military operations as well as US intelligence operations,” Simmons said.

That need has become even more pressing since Raul Castro took on the reins of power from his ailing brother, Fidel, in the first change of leadership in almost half a century on the communist-ruled island.

[H/T: La Nueva Cuba]

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Wired Magazine has published an article that addresses the painstakingly process of reconstructing torn surveillance files by hand of the Stasi (East Germany’s State Security Service), which had an influence over its tropical version–Cuba’s Ministry of Interior (MININT).

Will the MININT follow suit in tearing up files once the Castro regime is no longer in power?

A snippet of the article is as follows:

Because before it was disbanded, the Stasi shredded or ripped up about 5 percent of its files. That might not sound like much, but the agency had generated perhaps more paper than any other bureaucracy in history — possibly a billion pages of surveillance records, informant accounting, reports on espionage, analyses of foreign press, personnel records, and useless minutiae. There’s a record for every time anyone drove across the border.

[…]

In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany’s communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally “paper-wolves” and “rip-wolves,” German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper.

[…]

The machine-shredded stuff is confetti, largely unrecoverable. But in May 2007, a team of German computer scientists in Berlin announced that after four years of work, they had completed a system to digitally tape together the torn fragments. Engineers hope their software and scanners can do the job in less than five years — even taking into account the varying textures and durability of paper, the different sizes and shapes of the fragments, the assortment of printing (from handwriting to dot matrix) and the range of edges (from razor sharp to ragged and handmade.) “The numbers are tremendous. If you imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle at home, you have maybe 1,000 pieces and a picture of what it should look like at the end,” project manager Jan Schneider says. “We have many millions of pieces and no idea what they should look like when we’re done.”

[Photo: Wired]

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Cuba’s intelligence gathering capabilities has expanded well beyond its sphere of historical concentration: the US and Latin America.  According to a former counterintelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, Chris Simmons, Cuba has concentrated “to places where vital U.S. interests are at stake — like Iran, Turkey, India and Pakistan.” 

The Miami Herald further reports:

Simmons said a series of intelligence setbacks for Cuba between 1995 and 2003 — such as the dismantling of a network of spies in Miami, the closure of an intellingece center in Canada and the arrest of former DIA Cuba analyst Ana Montes in 2001 — forced Cuba to tighten its intelligence operations.  Today Cuba puts trusted top intelligence operatives in charge of key embassy postings and operates more with allies like Iran and Venezuela, Simmons said in a briefing organized by Miami Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.  Cuba’s intelligence apparatus, considered one of the world’s most formidable, numbers more than 11,500 agents, he said, of whom about 3,500 are focused on international operations.  Cuba has resorted to employing more of what he called ”ambassador-spies” — top intelligence chiefs who have become diplomatic envoys.  Before, Cuba placed such persons in the United States and with a few of Cuba’s closest allies, like the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

Mr. Simmons has created the Cuban Intelligence Research Center based in Leesburg VA.  Click here to visit the Center’s web site.

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Cuba’s armed forces have influenced Venezuela’s military affairs through its training and military advisors found in the FAN.

The Financial Times reports on the current relations between Hugo Chavez and “his” military:

President Hugo Chávez caused a stir earlier this year when he ordered members of Venezuela’s armed forces to salute their superiors with the words “Fatherland, Socialism or Death!”

It fuelled debate in the military over its involvement in politics and civil society – long a sensitive issue in Venezuela, not least since the failed coup five years ago against Mr Chávez, in which factions of the military played key roles both in deposing him and reinstating him.

[…]

Although Mr Chávez owes his continued success in elections to widespread support among the poorer sectors of the population, in governing the country he has consistently fallen back on the army’s support.

Over a quarter of the ministers that served in his government up to 2004 were military officers, while over a third of state governors have a military background. This has led to concerns of a militarisation of politics, although Mr Chávez says he lacks qualified civilians who back his project.

But the military is divided between a more conservative wing, seen by some to be represented by Mr Baduel, which wants to maintain a professional, independent force, and those promoting an ever-closer “civil-military union”. Mr Chávez has struggled to satisfy both.

The idea of a civil-military union is one of the principles behind Mr Chávez’s so-called “Bolivarian revolution”. It is argued that Venezuela can only succeed against a US invasion – however unlikely – through “asymmetrical warfare”, such as in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Mr Müller Rojas has argued that Venezuela’s arms build-up – which includes the purchase of 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 53 helicopters and 24 Sukhoi fighter jets as part of a $3bn contract with Russia – contradicts the theory of “asymmetrical warfare”, while Mr Baduel’s removal as minister of defence was seen to favour moves towards a civil-military union.

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Chris Simmons, a career counterintelligence officer and an expert on Cuban intelligence has written the following article on the Iran-Cuba nexus published in the Miami Herald:

Scott Carmichael, a senior counterintelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency, recently confirmed continued intelligence sharing between Iran and Cuba. Additionally, Israeli sources report that during last year’s meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana, Iranian and Cuban intelligence officers discussed increased collaboration in targeting the United States.

Close ties between Tehran and Havana have reportedly existed since Iran’s revolutionary leadership came to power in 1979. Given both nations’ sponsorship of terrorism, their continued collaboration imperils U.S. national security. In the past, Havana provided training and material to selected terrorist groups, some of which are Iranian allies. Today, Cuba remains a safe haven for some international terrorist groups and it allows safe transit to others. Furthermore, Iran’s Interests Section and its Mission to the United Nations appear inadequately staffed for significant intelligence collection. This shortfall likely makes Tehran even more dependent on Havana’s continued intelligence trafficking.

In 2006, Ricardo Cabrisas Ruiz — a career officer in Cuba’s premier foreign intelligence service, the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) — visited with senior Iranian government officials. This meeting followed his October 2003 meeting with President Mohammad Khatami on expanded ties between Havana and Tehran.

At the time, Cabrisas served under cover as a minister without portfolio. During their discussions, Khatami said reciprocal visits by officials of the two countries would lead to further expansion and consolidation of mutual ties. Khatami described his nation’s ties with Havana as exemplary and claimed that closer Cuba-Iran cooperation would benefit the entire world. Cabrisas publicly focused on Havana’s willingness to broaden ties with Tehran and underlined the need to bolster economic cooperation. The meeting called for the recurring visits by officials, scientists and others to develop these enhanced ties.

Since at least 1996, the DI has targeted U.S. technologies beneficial to the Cuban economy. With one of the most advanced biotechnology industries in the emerging world, Castro successfully made biotechnology a building block of the Cuban economy. Cuba now holds more than 400 biotechnology patents and earns considerable foreign currency through its sales of biotechnology products to more than 50 nations. Tehran and Havana first began collaborative work on dual-use biotechnologies in the early 1990s.

Acting on behalf of Tehran, in July 2003, Cuban intelligence jammed the transmissions of the National Iranian Television (NITV), the Voice of America and three other Iran-bound broadcasts. The extended jamming coincided with Tehran’s crackdown on the dissident commemoration of the historic 1999 student uprising.

Loral Skynet, owners of the targeted satellite, quickly traced the source of the jamming to a spot several miles outside of Havana. The location identified was the Cuban military intelligence’s Bejucal Signals Intelligence site, which intercepts and jams radio and television signals with equal ease. NITV first broadcast from its Los Angeles-based station in March 2000. However, Iran promptly jammed the Hot Bird 5 satellite in its static orbit over France.

NITV and other broadcasters then moved to Telstar 12, because its stationary orbit over the mid-Atlantic placed it outside the range of Iran’s jamming stations. However, the move placed NITV within range of Cuba, the only nation in the Western Hemisphere that jams foreign broadcasts. Worldwide, only seven nations engage in such illegal jamming.

Havana had demonstrated Tehran’s importance in May 2001 when Fidel Castro visited Iran. Cuba’s ambassador to Tehran, career DI officer Darío Urra Torriente, coordinated and oversaw all aspects of Castro’s meetings with Iran’s leaders. If history is any example, the focus of the conference was economic and political issues, as well as intelligence collaboration. Urra’s experience in the Arab world dates back to the early 1960s, when he served in Algiers. During that tour, he assisted in Algeria’s covert shipments of weaponry to Venezuelan revolutionaries.

(H/T: La Nueva Cuba)

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From today’s Inside the Ring (Washington Times):

Cuba’s intelligence service is stepping up activities in the United States because of the impending demise of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, according to intelligence officials.

The Cuban activities are aimed at finding out what the United States plans to do against Cuba in the aftermath of Mr. Castro’s death, such as backing regime opponents in a putsch.

Cuban intelligence collection is being stepped up against key U.S. targets, including the White House National Security Council, the State Department and the U.S. intelligence community with the goal of finding out U.S. policies and plans toward Cuba.

Cuban intelligence is “very good at this business” of spying, Joel F. Brenner, the national counterintelligence executive, told a breakfast meeting last week. Mr. Brenner said that the Cuban spy case of Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Montes “compromised our entire program against Cuba, electronic as well as human.”

Scott Carmichael, a Defense Intelligence Agency counterintelligence official and author of a new book on Montes called “True Believer,” said recently that Cuba’s intelligence service currently has penetrated the U.S. government to a similar extent as the former East German Stasi planted agents inside the West German government.

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