intelligence

The recent changes implemented by Cuba’s government (i.e., domestic appliances, cars, cell phones, and hotels now accessible to the populace) although positive, they do not go to the root of economic, social and political problems facing the country, writes Pedro Anibal Riera Escalante in La Nueva Cuba.

Riera Escalante under the cover of Cuban consul, was chief of Cuba’s Intelligence Center in Mexico City  in the 1990s where he was sent to surveil and penetrate Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations in Central America. Years later, Riera Escalante was involved in an incident, which turned into an international scandal. Believing that he was going to defect in Mexico, the Cuban regime ordered operatives to kidnap Riera bringing him to Cuba in less than 24 hours with cooperation of Mexico’s government. In Cuba, Riera served years in prison, and was later set free.

Riera emphasizes:

While dissidents and opposition are not permitted to have access to the press, these measures, do not really constitute a democratic opening in the country.

Might this point of view be the growing mindset of a faction within Cuba’s intelligence apparatus acknowledging Cuba’s political state through Riera’s written voice?

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Chris Simmons, a career counterintelligence officer for the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and expert in Cuban intelligence, wrote and op-ed published in the Miami Herald on the head of Cuba’s Interests Section (photo above), who was a former intelligence officer that might still be active.

Recent media accounts have heralded Havana’s selection of Jorge Bolaños as the incoming head of Cuba’s Interests Section in Washington. The conventional wisdom is that the posting of Bolaños, once the second-highest ranking Cuban diplomat, may indicate that Cuba seeks improved relations with the United States.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The CIA identified Bolaños as a suspected intelligence officer at least 34 years ago. More recently, a former member of Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI), Cuba’s principal espionage agency, confirmed that Bolaños was (or still is) an intelligence officer, although he was unclear whether Bolaños served with the DI or the notorious America Department (DA), the intelligence wing of the Cuban Communist Party. He observed that Bolaños is among a small group of old intelligence officers who at some point began working their cover identity more than their intelligence mission, as evidenced by his five appointments as ambassador.

It may be that Raúl Castro is not taking chances with what he used to call the Pinos Nuevos (New Pines, a reference to the younger generation). Bolaños is clearly part of the Vieja Guardia (Old Guard) and characterized as a very smart man who knows how to keep a low profile in order to avoid getting Fidel upset. The former DI operative suggested that Raúl Castro feels reassured relying on old colleagues like Bolaños.

His assessment of Bolaños’ intelligence ties is based on his close connections with the Superior Institute of Intelligence (ISI) as well as the DI and DA. Bolaños did not avoid such associations and was, in fact, a close friend of ISI Director Nestor Iturbi. Normally, career Cuban diplomats and senior officials stay away from the intelligence services because the association can cripple their careers when other countries’ counterintelligence officials get confused and identify them as intelligence collaborators or undercover DI or DA officers.

This former DI officer personally met Bolaños and spoke with him several times when he was assigned as a senior official with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Minrex). More so, Bolaños lived across the street from the ISI’s main entrance and parked one of his cars inside the ISI compound on a daily basis.

In August 2005, Paraguay investigated a large influx of Cuban nationals. At least two foreign governments had warned Asunción that Cuban intelligence officers were believed to be entering the country under tourist or medical cover. Predictably, it was Bolaños who, several years earlier, presided over the restoration of diplomatic relations with Paraguay while serving at Minrex.

In May 2004, the Mexican government ordered Bolaños to leave Mexico within 48 hours as a result of a spy scandal involving three DA officers: Orlando Silva Fors, José Antonio Arbesú and Pedro Miguel Lobaina-Jiménez de Castro. According to Le Monde, Lobaina headed the DA’s Mexico Section. Cuba and Mexico subsequently resolved Bolaños’ expulsion offer, and he remained Havana’s ambassador through September 2007.

It bears mentioning that Cuba’s Embassy in Mexico City hosts one of the two largest and most important DI Centers in the world (New York City is the other). Prior to his Mexico posting, Bolaños served in another assignment that closely tied him with Havana’s intelligence services. In the mid-1990s, he served as a first vice minister in Minrex, where he oversaw Havana’s interactions with Cubans living overseas. His duties there would have made him invaluable to the DI’s Department XIX (Counter-Revolutionary Targets), which pursues operations against the Cuban-American community.

At best, Bolaños is an experienced former intelligence officer with extensive connections throughout Cuban intelligence and the Ministry of Foreign Relations. At worst, he remains an active intelligence officer assigned to the DI, or more likely, the DA. Either way, the posting of this very skilled ambassador-spy is not a signal that Havana wants closer relations. Quite the opposite, the assignment of an Old Guard spy like Bolaños indicates that Havana’s main desire is to continue indefinitely its increased intelligence targeting of the United States.

Bolaños’ biography from the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

[Photo of Jorge Bolaños from La Jornada]

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Undercover Cuban officials (diplomats) attended a UN human rights news conference where government officials are strictly prohibited from attending. 

AP reports:

The United Nations has expressed regret that undercover Cuban officials attended a U.N. news conference on human rights, where they sought information on a French journalist asking critical questions about Fidel Castro’s regime.

Elena Ponomareva, spokeswoman for the global body’s European headquarters, said she was unable to prevent two Cuban diplomats from entering the Oct. 11 news event with Jean Ziegler, a U.N. rights expert who was preparing for a mission to the communist-run island.

The U.N. strictly prohibits government officials from attending news conferences unless they are explicitly invited and included among those presenting. Previous run-ins have occurred with Sudanese diplomats seeking to monitor rights officials speaking about Darfur.

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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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The Miami Herald reports on East Germany’s notorious Stasi security agency and its influence over the tropical version, Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior (MININT). Jorge Luís Vázquez, a Cuban exile who was jailed in 1987 in a Stasi cell, has found hundreds of East German government documents on Stasi relations with MININT, and is nearly finished writing what may well be the most thorough report to date on the links between the two security agencies.

The Stasi reconstructed MININT’s telephone and communications system in 1988 to better facilitate eavesdropping. Before that, in 1981, it modernized MININT’s printing press to enable better, faster production of party propaganda — and false passports used for espionage and subversion, Vázquez says.

The Stasi also overhauled the security system at José Martí International Airport in Havana, installing cameras, migration control booths and state-of-the-art X-ray equipment that mirrored identically the security methods in East Germany.

Coordinated espionage efforts between the Stasi and MININT also helped widen the Cuban secret service’s intelligence gathering. Vázquez’s study reveals that in 1985, Operation Palma Real, a cooperative action of ”electronic espionage” by German and Cuban agents, resulted in valuable interceptions of U.S. telephone and telegraph communications from the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo, Cuba.

Furthermore, the Stasi trained Cuban guerrillas who were being sent abroad to subvert other governments, teaching observation, espionage and interrogation techniques that considerably expanded Cuba’s impact on conflicts ranging from Central America to Africa, according to the documents Vázquez has gathered.

”What we see is a copy of the Stasi system that spread across the developing world — from Angola, Ethiopia and Mozambique to Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador,” as Cubans passed on the methodology and technology to others, he said.

And then there was that intriguing mention of LSD, in a letter from the MININT’s supply department formally requesting from the Stasi some 360 doses of the hallucinogenic. The document does not explain its use.

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