What Lies Across the Water
Speaking at the University of California Center in Washington.
The following is an abridged version of a talk I gave about my forthcoming book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, on April 18, 2012 at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C..
***
I am a late-comer to the case of the Cuban Five. I stumbled on the story a few years ago while researching a novel—a love story—set partly in Cuba.
During a trip to Havana in the spring of 2009, I struck up a friendship with a guide who was showing me the city I wouldn’t see as a tourist. Partly to make conversation and partly because I was curious, I asked him what he thought of the prospects for improved relations between Havana and Washington now that Barak Obama was in the White House.
He didn’t hesitate. “Forget Obama,” he said. “Nothing will change until the case of the Five is resolved.”
The Cuban Five? I’d barely heard of them.
So he gave me a history lesson—about how a group of Cuban intelligence agents had uncovered a plot to be blow up an airplane; about how author Gabriel Garcia Marquez had carried a secret message from Fidel Castro to Bill Clinton with details of the plot; about how a delegation from the FBI had gone to Havana to meet with their counterparts in Cuban State Security to discuss it; and how, less than three months later, the FBI had arrested not the Miami-based terrorists who were planning to blow up the plane but the Cuban intelligence agents who were trying to stop them.
You can look it up, he said.
I did. I found a Fidel Castro speech on the Internet that outlined the Cuban version of events. Castro even read into the record the entire 4,000-word text of a previously secret report Garcia Marquez had written to Castro following his meeting with White House officials in Washington.
I was hooked. I put the novel on hold and began researching the nonfiction story of the Cuban Five.
***
I came at it as a “story” rather than a “cause,” and I think that’s important. Too often there is a sense of rote in our rhetoric about the Five. They are the “five heroes” who were “unjustly accused,” “unfairly tried and convicted” and then “punitively punished” simply for being “anti-terrorist fighters.”
It’s all true, of course, but it doesn’t help convince those who aren’t already convinced. Many Americans, I don’t have to tell you, are prepared to believe the worst about Cuba, and especially about Cuban government agents.
My goal was to tell the story—and it is a fascinating story—as a nonfiction narrative.
It begins in 1990 when a civilian Cuban pilot named René González “stole” a plane in Havana and flew it to Key West where he “defected.” González, in fact, was the first of the five Cuban intelligence agents sent to set up shop in Florida.
He arrived soon after a debate about the fate of Orlando Bosch had raged in the Miami media. Bosch—a well known anti-Cuban terrorist considered one of the masterminds behind a 1976 explosion aboard a Cubana Airlines plane that killed 73 people—had applied for residency in the U.S.. The justice department (though not necessarily the White House) opposed his application; Miami’s exile community supported Bosch. Guess who won?
I wanted to incorporate into the unfolding narrative details about what the various Miami exile groups were actually plotting (a lot), what the U.S. government was doing to stop them (precious little) and what the Cuban intelligence agents were learning about what the exiles were really up to (plenty).
As part of my research, I read the 20,000-plus pages of transcript from the trial of the Five, examined the binders-full of even more thousands of pages of decoded documents and correspondence between the Cuban agents and their bosses back in Havana.
I began a still-ongoing, still un-won battle with the FBI for documents relating to what I believe is a critically important meeting between the FBI and Cuban State Security in Havana in June 1998. After two years of appeals, I have only finally gotten the FBI to admit there are documents. But I’m still waiting to see them.
I also, of course, interviewed key figures in Havana, Miami and Washington—none of them more intriguing than Percy Alvarado.
Though not one of the Five, Alvarado too was a Cuban intelligence agent who operated in Miami around the same time as the Five. He claims he infiltrated the powerful Cuban American National Foundation. Key members of the Foundation recruited him to plant bombs in Cuba, he says. And Luis Posada himself—an acknowledged anti-Castro terrorist—trained him how to assemble the bombs he was supposed to sneak into Cuba.
Now let’s be clear. Everyone in this business lies. It is the nature of the clandestine world, and you should never take it on faith that anyone—American or Cuban—is telling the whole truth. That said, I was struck by the fact that what Alvarado publicly alleged in 1999 was later corroborated—inadvertently—by a senior official of CANF who just happened to be suing his former comrades in arms.
I also interviewed, by mail and email, members of the Five. I found them to be impressive, courageous figures.
***
I want to talk today about some of what I learned in that process. It wasn’t always what I expected. Or what I'd been told to expect.
The versions I’d read from some Cuban Five supporters, for instance, made it appear as if the FBI had learned the identities of the Five because of the information Cuban State Security turned over to them at those meetings in June 1998.
That’s not true. The FBI had been following the Cubans since at least 1996.
Which raises an intriguing question. Why did the FBI arrest them when they did?
I’ll come back to that.
The Cubans have also been at pains to argue that their agents were only in Florida to monitor the activities of exile terrorists groups.
Again, not entirely true.
One of the agents, Antonio Guerrero had an almost exclusively military mission. That inconvenient truth—rarely acknowledged by Cuban authorities—has provided anti-Castro mainstream journalists and commentators the opportunity to make it appear as if the Cubans’ primary mission was to “infiltrate” American military bases or steal U.S. secrets.
It wasn’t. The military aspect of their duties was minor—and there is an important context to it. Guerrero’s primary function was to serve as the canary in the coal mine, an early warning system of a possible U.S. invasion of Cuba.
The U.S. has satellites to keep an eye on its enemies—a variation on spying we accept as legitimate. The Cubans can’t afford satellites. They have human observers instead. Like Tony Guerrero.
His job was to pay attention to the comings and goings of military aircraft at the Boca Chica Naval Station. Was there a sudden build up of planes on the runways? What kinds? An unusual number of brass-hat visitors to the base?
The Cubans had legitimate reasons to fear an invasion—and not just because that’s what the influential Miami exile leadership prayed for each night. The Cubans knew what had already happened in Haiti, in Panama.
***
What did the Cuban agents actually do in Florida?
Most of the time they kept a close watch on exile groups they believed were plotting attacks on their homeland. They knew that those militant exile groups were rarely arrested, even more rarely tried and almost never convicted.
To keep the exiles from succeeding, the agents had to be inventive.
Consider just one example from July of 1998, two months before they were arrested.
Gerardo Hernandez, the controller of the Miami agents, received an urgent coded message from Havana that there was a vaguely identified “boat bomb” filled with weapons and explosives docked in the Miami River. The vessel was destined to be used as a weapon against Cuba.
Hernandez and his team of agents soon tracked down the vessel at a marina near a populated area.
What to do about it?
They certainly didn’t want to allow the vessel to sail, of course, but Hernandez realized the options Havana had suggested—blowing up the vessel, or sinking it—were all too risky, and might endanger innocent civilians.
Instead, Hernandez messaged his bosses, cleverly suggesting someone call the FBI anonymously and tip them off about the boat’s cargo.
A week later, a story appeared in the Miami Herald. The headline: ANTI TERRORISM RAID COMES UP EMPTY. The story detailed how members of Miami’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, acting on an anonymous tip, had raided vessels in a Miami River marina. They were looking for explosives and guns destined for a “third country.” But the raid was a “bust,” according to an FBI spokesman. They didn’t find anything.
How hard were they looking? The FBI agent in charge was a guy named George Kisynzki. Two weeks earlier, in the pages of the New York Times, Luis Posada himself had described the agent as a “very good friend.”
What was going on? “Law enforcement veterans saw the search as an FBI hint... to cancel any conspiracies,” the Miami Herald reported. “That’s a common practice in South Florida… known as ‘admonishing’ or ‘demobilizing’ an operation.”
We later learned more about this particular incident. The boat’s owner was a man named Enrique Bassas. Bassas, a wealthy Miami businessman, had been one of the co-founders of a sixties-era terrorist umbrella group called CORU, which had been responsible for blowing up that Cuban plane in 1976. More recently, Cuban intelligence had identified Bassas as one of the financiers of a new mercenary, anti-Castro army being organized in Miami.
Perhaps most significantly, the month before the raid, Bassas had been in Guatemala City meeting with Luis Posada. They were, according to a later report, trying to figure out how to sneak weapons and explosives into the Dominican Republic.
The Dominican Republic? That just happened to be where Fidel Castro was scheduled to speak the following month.
The Miami Herald later reported on this botched assassination plot and came up with its own—close to the money—explanation for what had gone wrong. Cuban intelligence agents, explained the Herald, “presumed by most law enforcement and exile experts to have penetrated many exile organizations, tipped the FBI to protect Castro's life during the visit to the Dominican Republic.”
There are a lot of episodes like that in the trial records. It’s also clear from those records the Cuban agents weren’t interested in using violence to achieve their objective of preventing exile attacks on their homeland.
Which is more than can be said for the exiles.
***
But what then are we to make of the most damaging charge—conspiracy to commit murder—against Gerardo Hernandez?
That charge relates to the February 1996 shootdown of two unarmed Brothers to the Rescue aircraft in the Straits of Florida that killed four civilians.
There’s no doubt that charge—filed seven months after the arrests—affected the cases of all five defendants and unduly influenced the harsh sentences they all received. Including, of course, Hernandez himself, who is currently serving two life sentences plus 15 years in prison for his supposed role in the shootdown.
And the allegation continues to resonate today. Whenever the question of pardoning the Five, or swapping them for the American Alan Gross is raised, the inevitable answer is that the U.S. could never consider such a deal because the Five were responsible for the deaths of four innocent men.
I spent a lot of time focusing on that allegation. I read the transcript. I studied the court documents. I read the International Civil Aviation report on the incident.
The reality is that there is no a shred of compelling evidence to suggest Gerardo Hernandez knew about the plan to shoot down the planes, or that he had any control over, or role in what happened.
Indeed the evidence paints a very different picture of what Hernandez really knew.
Cuban State Security is famed for its compartmentalization. I tell another story in the book about two agents who’d infiltrated the same exile group and the efforts Havana undertook to make sure neither man knew the other was actually working for the same side.
The back-and-forth memos between Havana and its field officers in the lead-up to the shootdown make it clear everything was on a need-to-know basis—and Gerardo Hernandez didn’t need to know what the Cuban military was considering.
There are, of course, plenty of other unresolved issues about the shootdown.
Were the Brothers’ planes in international waters as the Americans claim, or in Cuban airspace as Havana argues? The best answer to that question could come from U.S. satellite images taken by any one of more than a half-dozen satellites the American government and its agencies had tracking events that day, but Washington so far refuses to release them.
More importantly, was shooting down the planes a reasonable response to the Brothers’ provocation?
Those provocations had been going on for seven intense months prior to the shootdown. The Cubans had complained. Washington had tried—and failed—to prevent the continuing overflights. And the Cubans had sent several clear messages to Washington that it would take action if there were any more illegal incursions into their territory.
To make matters worse, the Cubans knew—thanks to their agents—that Brothers to the Rescue were test firing air-to-ground weapons they could conceivably decide to use against Cuba. They were more than a nuisance; they were a threat.
That said, I don’t believe the shootdown was the most reasonable response. There were alternatives, including forcing the planes down and putting the pilots on trial.
But my view doesn’t change the only important reality: Gerardo Hernandez was not involved in shooting down the planes and he should never have been charged.
***
Which leads to yet another question: should the Five themselves have ever been charged with anything?
Well, they did commit crimes. They failed to register as foreign agents, and three of them carried false identity documents. Those are minor, commonplace crimes in the world of intelligence; American agents operating in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Moscow and elsewhere commit them everyday.
But there is no evidence the Cuban agents stole military secrets or threatened American security. That’s why they were never charged with actual espionage—just “conspiracy to commit espionage.” A thought crime versus an actual crime.
***
The other point that’s worth making is that the FBI knew exactly who the Cuban agents were and what they were doing in Florida. They’d been following them for at least two years. They’d broken into their apartments, stolen their computer disks, decoded them. They knew what they did each day, even about their love lives.
Let me give you just one example of how closely the FBI followed the Cuban agents. In April 1998, one of the Five traveled to New York to meet—supposedly secretly—with an intelligence officer from the Cuban Mission there. The FBI knew about the rendezvous—at a Wendy’s on the Hempstead Turnpike—far enough in advance that they were not able to have seven video cameras and countless still cameras recording the meeting but they were also able to plant of their own 35 agents at the fast food restaurant that day. It must have been a surprisingly good day for the operators of that Wendy’s!
So let’s consider the situation from the point of view of the FBI. You have complete access to a Cuban intelligence network and, better, the Cubans don’t know you do. You know that they’re not doing anything to threaten U.S. security; in fact, much of what they’re doing—monitoring compliance with the U.S. Neutrality Act—is your job.
So why arrest them?
The moment you arrest them, you lose access to this unfolding intelligence gold mine. And, worse, you know these captured agents will simply be replaced by another group of agents—and then you’ll have to discover the new guys and start all over again.
So why arrest the Five when they did?
There are things we don’t know about that. But there are some things we do.
In May 1998, the FBI appointed a new Special Agent in Charge of its Miami Field Office. His name was Hector Pesquera, the first Hispanic to head up that very important, very political FBI field office in the heartland of Cuban America.
We know Pesquera quickly made friends with key leaders in the Miami Cuban exile community, including a convicted felon who’d been a former police officer in Batista’s pre-Castro Cuba—not to forget a number of high-profile exile leaders Cuban intelligence had identified as terrorists.
It was just a month after Pesquera arrived on the scene, of course, that the FBI delegation flew to Havana to meet with their Cuban counterparts. That's when the Cubans gave the FBI documents fingering some of Pesquera’s new friends as terrorists.
The Cubans would later say they believed the agents who came to Havana treated the information they turned over to them seriously, and genuinely intended to follow up.
And yet, three months later, FBI swat teams swooped in and arrested the Five, ignoring the exile plotters entirely.
We know Pesquera made that decision. We know because he said so. After he’d initially been appointed, Pesquera told a Spanish language radio station following the arrests, “I was updated on everything there was. We then began to concentrate on this investigation. As far as intelligence[-gathering] is concerned, [I decided] it shouldn’t be there anymore; it should change course and become a criminal investigation.”
We know his agents on the ground objected.
We also know—because Pesquera himself bragged about it—that he lobbied all the way to the top of the FBI food chain in Washington for authorization to make the arrests. He later told the Miami Herald the case “never would have made it to court” if he hadn’t lobbied FBI Director Louis Freeh directly. “To this day there are people in my headquarters who are not completely sold.”
No kidding.
I've tried to interview Pesquera, who retired from the FBI in 2003—after authorizing the destruction of the FBI’s files on Luis Posada—but he continues to give me the runaround.
Late last month, however, Pesquera popped up in the news again; he’s just been appointed the chief of police in his native Puerto Rico.
The universe continues to unfold…
And the Cuban Five remain stuck in the United States, four still in prison, one in the prison of parole.
***
It will not be easy to right this injustice, not in a country where in the past week the manager of a Miami baseball team was forced to make a groveling apology for offering the mildest of praise for Fidel Castro, and where the owner of a Miami restaurant faced anonymous threats because her restaurant just happened to be located on the ground floor of a building whose roof featured (however briefly) a billboard calling for Freedom for the Five.
Those prejudices and fears will be difficult to overcome. But they must be. And that’s why it’s especially important to make the case based on the facts.
I hope my forthcoming book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, will contribute to that conversation.
***
We hear a lot these days about Alan Gross, a U.S. government contractor who is currently serving 15 years in a Cuban prison for smuggling illegal communications equipment into Cuba.
His supporters, like those of the Five, are demanding his release.
While the two cases are different in many important ways, the key reality is that the Cuban government is unlikely to consider releasing Alan Gross unless the U.S. government reciprocates by releasing the Cuban Five. And the U.S. government won’t release the Five without considerable public pressure.
That’s why those who are arguing Alan Gross’ case need to know about the Cuban Five.
They need to look beyond the rhetoric, both from supporters of the Five but also—and more importantly—from an American government that disingenuously insists the Five were somehow threatening U.S. security and responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians.
I will close with a quote from Jane Franklin, a widely respected expert on Cuban-American relations. She was responding to a recent column in the Washington Post in which Alan Gross’ wife, Judith, drew heartfelt but false parallels between her husband’s situation and that of the Five.
If she were Judith Gross, Franklin wrote, “I would study the cases of the Cuban Five to find out exactly how they came to be arrested, tried in Miami, convicted, and sent to separate prisons around the United States. Having come to grips with the outrageous injustice of their imprisonment, I would then commit my life to a campaign for releasing the Cuban Five in exchange for my husband Alan Gross.”
Good advice for us all. Thank you.
***
Stephen Kimber’s book What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five will be published by Fernwood Publishing in the Spring of 2013. An excerpt—focusing on the circumstances leading up to the shooting down of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft in February 1996—is available now as an ebook from Amazon.
___
You may also wish to read a response to my talk—and book—by Arturo Lopez-Levy. A former Cuban Ministry of the Interior analyst who left Cuba in 2001 " because of serious disagreements with the communist system," Lopez-Levy is now a lecturer in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver Institute in Colorado.
"Whatever you might think about the Cuban Five, if you want to know how their case fits into the history of relations between Cuba and the United States, you must read this book," Lopez-Levy says. "The author Stephen Kimber presents a well written short narrative about how the Cuban five ended up in US prisons. The book reads more as reportage for the general public than as an academic report. The author has studied the long history of conflict between Cuba and the United States and the use of terror as a political weapon by Cuban right wing groups in Florida..." Read more.
Copyright 2012 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Me, the FBI and the documents… take 33
David M. Hardy
Section Chief
Record Information Dissemination Section
Records Management Division
FBI
Washington, DC
Dear David M. Hardy,
Imagine my excitement when I received your recent letter in which you informed me that those FBI files you had previously said didn't exist actually did. Four hundred and nine pages, to be exact, of which you were prepared to release 407 of them to me.
Hard copy or CD, you asked?
CD please, I replied.
As you may recall, our ongoing, never-ending correspondence began in May 2010 when I first requested copies of “all reports, correspondence, memos, notes, emails and other records concerning a meeting between a delegation from the FBI and Cuban State Security in Havana in June 1998. My understanding is that the meeting itself took place from June 15-17, but I am also seeking any material relating to preparations for this meeting as well as follow-up from it for the period from May 1, 1998 to September 15, 1998.”
During those meetings, as you know, Cuba claims it handed over documents identifying dozens of U.S.-based individuals and groups involved in countless specific incidents of terrorism against Cuba—documents they have since kindly provided to me.
When I asked for American documents relating to these same meetings, you initially wrote back to say there were no such documents. None. At all.
That struck me as strange, so I wrote back to ask you to check again. You did. Still nothing.
I wrote again. Surely, I suggested, there must at least be a few hotel napkin notes, the odd expense voucher.
Well, you replied finally, yes, indeed, there might be a few scraps of paper. But you couldn't give them to me because, you see, there are ongoing investigations and releasing this sensitive material might compromise "pending or prospective" judicial proceedings "pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A)."
Odder still. What proceedings? The Cuban Five, as you know, were all convicted in 2001. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of their convictions in 2009. And those meetings in Havana in 1998 weren't even about the Five, whose criminal case was not yet even a gleam in an FBI agent’s eye at that time.
The meetings were about the nefarious activities that U.S.-based terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles had been plotting and carrying out against Cuba. It is true the U.S. did finally, belatedly, prosecute Posada—not for blowing up that Cuban airplane in 1976, killing all 73 passengers, or for that string of bombings at Havana hotels in 1997 that killed an Italian-Canadian businessman but… wait for it…—for lying on an immigration form in 2005. And he was acquitted! (How did that happen anyway?)
Since then, there’s not been the slightest hint the FBI has any further interest in investigating Posada or any one else named in the Cuban documents.
So what “pending or prospective” cases were you referring to?
Patience and persistence being virtues I have come to depend on in our correspondence, I wrote you again on May 23, 2011.
"I'm sure if you rummage through the material I requested," I wrote, "you’ll discover at least a few scraps of paper that won’t compromise any ongoing investigations or pending prosecutions. Perhaps there’s an email outlining the background to the decision to send the FBI delegation to Havana in the first place. Or maybe a report—potential indictees’ names redacted—on whether the trip was worth it. How about a few receipts for meals, or a night on the town at the Tropicana? Given that the Cubans claimed one of the exile plots involved setting off explosives at the nightclub, that would certainly have been a legitimate expense."
Many months later, you wrote again to say that—Abracadabra! Sha-zam! Ka-boom!—“material was located pursuant to your request for information concerning Cuban State Security and FBI meeting in Havana (June 1998). Enclosed is a processed copy of the FBI Headquarters file 95D-HQ-1255131 and FBI Miami Field Office file 2-MM-89519-NC.”
Excitedly, I slipped the CD into my computer. There were two files: “FBI FOIA Relase (sic) Section 1 (1042207).pdf” and “FBI FOIA Release 1150092-003 Section 1 (1042747).pdf.”
The first—a small file containing only 129 kilobytes—consisted of two documents from the FBI lab in Washington, which essentially showed that, on June 18, 1998, an FBI examiner (NAME REDACTED) had examined three explosives samples and four electric detonators provided by the Cubans. By themselves, the report concluded, the items were not very helpful—largely because Dupont, the most likely manufacturer of the detonators, produced 50 million of them a year and they were “exported all over the world.”
Unfortunately, I already had copies of these documents since they’d been introduced as evidence during the trial of Luis Posada in 2010 and were, therefore, public.
But thanks for thinking of me.
Ever hopeful, I opened File #2, which seemed—at 37.2 MB—more promising.
Alas. With the exception of a potentially intriguing two-page memo dated July 16, 1998 and titled REDACTED (except for a couple of tag-on subjects: ACT OF TERRORISM, NEUTRALITY MATTERS-CUBA; 00: MIAMI).
In the memo, the author, NAME REDACTED (visible last letters “r-l-o”), asks “that the following subfiles be opened.” Most of the titles of the subfolders, however, are blanked out with the exceptions of “Laboratory reports,” “FD-302s, inserts” and “Newspaper clippings.”
Ah, yes, newspaper clippings.
The remaining 400 pages of the file you sent me contained nothing except newspaper clippings, some of them quite recent (including from the immigration fraud case against Luis Posada) and therefore outside the scope of what I’d asked from. There were also stories from 1990s from the Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, Orlando Sun-Sentinel, TIME, AP, CNN, ABC, La Prensa, Ann Louise Bardach’s website, Granma International, the official Cuban news agency, even a Cuban Ministry of the Interior press release.
There were four different copies of the same July 1997 New York Times series in which Luis Posada not only claimed credit for setting off those bombs in Havana hotels and killing Fabio DiCelmo—wrong place, wrong time; “I sleep like a baby”—but also insisted he was funded by the Cuban American National Foundation, the most influential exile lobby group in the United States.
Incredible, don’t you think, that the FBI never managed to connect the dots from the bombs to Posada to the Foundation? Or perhaps they weren’t really looking.
But I digress.
I do appreciate the newspaper clippings—I would have appreciated them more if you’d sent them before I spent close to $1,000 downloading copies from the Miami Herald and other news databases—but this still isn’t what I was looking for.
So… I really hate to do this, but I’m appealing again.
Can you look one more time—open a few drawers if you have to this time—and find all those “reports, correspondence, memos, notes, emails and other records concerning a meeting between a delegation from the FBI and Cuban State Security in Havana in June 1998.”
Yours in patience and persistence,
Stephen Kimber
Copyright 2012 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
The material that didn’t exist does exist, but I still can’t see it…
For more than a year, I've been using American Freedom of Information legislation to try to obtain copies of "all reports, correspondence, memos, notes, emails and other records concerning a meeting between a delegation from the FBI and Cuban State Security in Havana in June 1998. My understanding is that the meeting itself took place from June 15-17, but I am also seeking any material relating to preparations for this meeting as well as follow-up from it for the period from May 1, 1998 to September 15, 1998.”
I need the material for a book I'm writing about the Cuban Five.
Twice, the FBI responded that it had no records of any such meetings. Twice I appealed, the last time in an open letter, which explains the background to the request. The good news is that I now have a reply to my last appeal. The records exist! The bad news? Well, I'll let my latest correspondence with the FBI's FOIPA powers that be speak for itself...
David M. Hardy
Section Chief
Record/Information Dissemination Section
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Washington, DC 20535
Re: Freedom of Information Appeal Request #1150092-002
Dear Mr. Hardy:
So… the FBI records that I requested that didn’t previously exist now do exist. That’s encouraging.
But you say you still can’t let me see them because “the records responsive to your request are law enforcement records; that there is a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records; and that the release of the information contained in these responsive records could reasonably be expected to interfere with the enforcement proceedings.”
Let me see if I have this right.
On June 15, 1998—13 years ago today—officials of Cuban State Security met in Havana with a delegation from the FBI. Over the course of three days, the Cubans turned over to the FBI documents and evidence it had collected concerning alleged American-financed terrorist plots against Cuba. The FBI took those documents and some of the evidence back to Washington and…
Now, 13 years later—despite not having laid one single charge against one single individual or group as a direct result of the information the Cubans provided—you are telling me there is some mysterious, magical “pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding” that prevents you from spilling the beans to me.
Really?
I’m sure the Cuban government will be thrilled to hear the news that an arrest must be just around the next newscast.
During the meetings, the Cubans provided you with dossiers on 40 individuals they described as “elements linked to terrorism.” They gave your agents their physical descriptions, pseudonyms, relatives, known associates and home and work addresses and phone numbers, as well as details of their various alleged actions against Cuba. Those folks—Pepe Hernandez, Andres Nazario Sargen, Roberto Martin Perez, Guillermo Novo Sampoll, Enrique Bassas, Rolando Borges, Luis Zuñiga, etc., etc., etc.—must now be quaking in their boots at the certain knowledge your agents are on their trail. I’m sure Orlando Bosch, in exilio heaven, is thanking whatever gods that be that he slipped this mortal coil just before your agents smashed down his door—13 years after the fact.
I do realized that Luis Posada Carriles—one of those singled out by the Cubans as the mastermind of the 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign that killed one man and wounded 12 others—was indeed charged in the United States. But it was just for lying on his immigration application rather than for the bombings themselves (or for his alleged role in the 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing that killed 73 people and for which he is still wanted by Venezuelan authorities).
We all know, of course, what happened with that particular prosecution. Posada was acquitted on all counts. Last night, they even held a ceremony in Hialeah, Florida, to present him with the keys to the city. I’m guessing there are no more “pending or prospective” Posada court appearances.
But perhaps there are others I don’t know about. Far be it from me to want to interfere with a “pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding”—no matter how belated.
That said, I’m sure if you rummage through the material I requested—the material that now exists that didn’t previously exist—you’ll discover at least a few scraps of paper that won’t compromise any ongoing investigations or pending prosecutions. Perhaps there’s an email outlining the background to the decision to send the FBI delegation to Havana in the first place. Or maybe a report—potential indictees’ names redacted—on whether the trip was worth it. How about a few receipts for meals, or a night on the town at the Tropicana? Given that the Cubans claimed one of the exile plots involved setting off explosives at the nightclub, that would certainly have been a legitimate expense.
Perhaps the best starting point would be for you to provide me with an itemized list of everything that’s in the file—the one that now exists that didn’t previously exist—along with an explanation of what specifically makes each item exempt from disclosure “pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A).” And we can go from there.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
Yours truly,
Stephen Kimber
Copyright 2011 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
FBI claims they have ‘no records…’ They’ve got to be kidding
An open letter to the FBI about a certain meeting that took place in Havana in June 1998 and why they now claim to have no records of it...
Dear David M. Hardy,
Thanks for your letter of January 25, 2011, in which you inform me that “a new search of the indices of our Central records System was conducted for records concerning the subject of your request. Through this search we determined there are no records responsive to your request.”
No records? You’re kidding, right? Seriously? No records?
I know you must get a lot of Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts (FOIPA) requests (which is probably why it seems to take so long for you to tell me you have nothing to tell me), so let me remind you of the “subject” of my request.
On May 5, 2010, I submitted a request for:
“all reports, correspondence, memos, notes, emails and other records concerning a meeting between a delegation from the FBI and Cuban State Security in Havana in June 1998. My understanding is that the meeting itself took place from June 15-17, but I am also seeking any material relating to preparations for this meeting as well as follow-up from it for the period from May 1, 1998 to September 15, 1998.”
You responded a few months later to say that you had given my request a bureaucratic identification number (see, you do keep records)—FOI/PA #1150092—but that you had scoured the entire dead file room on my behalf and come up with nothing. Nada. Sorry.
You didn’t say you wouldn’t give me the documents. You said there were no documents.
But if I was so inclined, you kindly added, I could ask again.
So I did. Nicely.
On October 5, 2010, I wrote you again, repeating my original request and adding some additional information I hoped would provide bread-crumb clues on your path past the departmental dust bunnies to the files I sought.
I wrote:
- The records I am seeking relate to meetings in Havana in connection with an FBI investigation into a series of bombings that had occurred at hotels and resorts in Cuba during the mid-1990s. My understanding is that Cuban authorities claimed they had evidence of American involvement in the bomb plots and that the purpose of the meetings was for the Cubans to share information they had gathered.
- According to evidence presented at the trial of the Cuban Five (Transcript 10925-6), in the year prior to the meeting in Havana, “the United States sent five separate diplomatic notes to the Government of Cuba requesting a meeting concerning the evidence that the government of Cuba had regarding those bombings” and that the FBI “had requested such a meeting for over a year” prior to June 1998.
- Also according to evidence presented at the trial of the Cuban Five (Transcript P10871), two of the Americans involved in the meetings in Havana in June 1998 were described as FBI agents Agustin Rodriguez and Luis Rodriguez.
- The transcript (P10871) also indicates that there was at least one follow-up meeting in Washington in 1999 to discuss the FBI’s analysis of material presented to them during the June 1998 meeting in Havana.
I had hoped that this finder’s aid might assist you in locating the documents but, alas, your letter of January 25 dashed my hopes once again.
Your new search had come up with the old result. Nothing.
What am I to make of this?
Are your telling me the meeting didn’t happen? Or that the meeting happened but no one wrote a single word about it before, during or after?
Let’s start with the first possibility. There was no meeting.
So far as I can tell, the first official mention of the meeting occurred in March 1999 when Cuban State Security Col. Adalberto Rabiero testified about it during the Havana trial of a Salvadoran mercenary accused of planting some of the bombs.
Rabeiro testified that information linking the hotel bombings to Luis Posada and the Cuban American National Foundation had been turned over to ”a team of specialists”—that, I believe, would be you folks in the FBI—who had been “sent by important U.S. officials” to Havana.
Commie propaganda? Disinformation?
Apparently not. On March 24, 1999, the Miami Herald followed up with a news story that began: “FBI agents have been examining evidence provided by Cuba officials linking exiles to terror attacks, but Havana has been avoiding a follow-up meeting with the investigators since December, U.S. officials say.”
A follow-up meeting. Meaning there must have been a meeting.
And there’s more. I’m attaching this title page from a 65-page document—INFORME SOBRE LAS ACTIVIADES TERRORISTAS CONTRA CUBA—that Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior says it prepared and gave to your officials at those meetings. Look at the bottom of the page. June 1998...
Ring any bells?
I also have a copy of another 52-page document—ANEXOS OPERATIVOS—Cuban authorities say they handed over at the same time. It includes names, then-current addresses, alternate addresses, phone numbers, car licence plate numbers, etc., etc., for various and sundry alleged anti-Castro terrorists, most of whom were living in the United States… just in case you ever wanted to find them.
Am I getting warmer?
I also have an actual FBI document—see, you do have documents!—filed in the ongoing, never-ending Luis Posada immigration fraud case in El Paso, Texas. It’s from a report prepared by one Thomas J. Mohnal (I believe he was another member of the FBI delegation in Havana, so you might ask him if he made other notes as well) concerning what he says was “a field examination of four (4) electric detonators… conducted in Havana, Cuba… on June 17, 1998.” On the third page, there's another reference to a "communication received June 18, 1998."
I’d tell you the Case ID# but it’s blacked out on the copy I have. I’m sure you can find it—and see what other documents might be in attached.
So… I think it’s fair to say there was a meeting between Cuban State Security officials and a delegation from the FBI in Havana in June 1998.
Which brings us to the second possibility: for whatever reasons, no one committed to paper anything, anywhere, anytime about these meetings. Before, during, or after.
I don’t know about the internal workings of the FBI, of course, but I can’t imagine any government agency anywhere that doesn’t run on paper.
If FBI officials went to Havana in June 1998—and I think we’ve established they did—then they must have left a trail, at the very least, of requisitions and receipts.
If they didn’t swim from the Florida Keys to Havana, then there should be a written record somewhere of how they got there.
If they were in Havana for three days, they must have stayed somewhere. My money’s on the Hotel Nacional. It’s near the United States Interests Section and is known to be popular with visiting American officials. I’ve stayed there myself, so I know it’s easy to get a receipt.
Plus… even FBI agents have to eat. Even in Cuba. Did anyone collect a restaurant receipt over the course of three days that they wanted to be reimbursed for?
Maybe they spent a night out at the famous Tropicana nightclub—for research purposes, of course, and kept the receipt. (According to the Cubans, the Tropicana, and its tourist patrons, were among the targets of the bombing campaign.)
More substantively, I’m guessing that—given that the U.S. “sent five separate diplomatic notes to the Government of Cuba requesting a meeting concerning the evidence that the government of Cuba had regarding those bombings” before the June 1998 meetings—there must have been some interest among higher ups in the FBI and Justice Department, perhaps even the White House, about the progress of negotiations for the get-together.
Are you trying to tell me there wasn’t some quickly dashed-off note (“Hey, the Cubans said yes! We’re packing!") to let someone in authority know the meeting would actually take place? And then, of course, a post-it note or two on how the discussions had gone, plans for follow-up, etc., etc..
As I said in my initial letter way back when, I’m interested in this information because I’m working on a book on the Cuban Five, a group of Cuban intelligence agents known as the Wasp Network who were arrested in Miami less than three months after those FBI officials returned from Havana.
Some commentators have suggested those unprecedented June 1998 meetings in Havana could have signaled the beginning of a new era of cooperation the United States and Cuba. But any hopes that that could happen were dashed by the arrest of the Five.
What happened in the three months between the Havana meetings and the Miami arrests?
Why did the FBI suddenly choose to arrest the Cubans, whom they’d surreptitiously been following for close to three years?
Hector Pesquera—the Special Agent in charge of your Miami office at the time of both the meetings in Havana and the subsequent arrests—has said that when he took up his duties in Miami in the spring of 1998, he was briefed on all the Bureau’s ongoing investigations. He decided, he said, that the FBI’s priority to develop additional intelligence about Cuba’s spy networks “shouldn’t be there any more. [The investigation] should change course and become a criminal investigation.”
According to author Anne Louise Bardach in her 2003 book, Cuba Confidential, Pesquera’s decision caused consternation in the Miami field office where he was considered too friendly with some in the anti-Castro exile community (including, it should be noted, at least one prominent exile singled out in the Anexos Operativos). According to Bardach, one agent told her that Pesquera “abandon[ed] all investigations into exile terrorism. Instead he decided to make his name with the Wasp network.”
Pesquera acknowledged to the Miami Herald (July 10, 2001) that there had been disagreements about whether to arrest the Five, and that the case “never would have made it to court" if Pesquera himself had not directly lobbied then FBI Director Leonard Freeh.
I’m guessing there must be a paper trail there too, even just a few for-the-record notes of telephone or face-to-face conversations. I’d love to read those… assuming, as I do, that they exist.
Which is why I am asking you to take one more look for the information I’ve requested and—just in case the information got “somehow… attached to another folder,” as another piece of FBI correspondence to me delicately phrased it—let me expand the date range of my request to begin on September 4, 1997—the date of the Copacabana Hotel bombing—and end on December 31, 2000, at the beginning of the trial of the Cuban Five.
Thanks in advance for your assistance in this matter.
Sincerely,
Stephen Kimber
Spanish version at Cubadebate.
Copyright 2011 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Does the U.S. government want to convict Posada?
El Paso Federal Court House
If you are inclined to conspiracy theories, you might conclude—based on the evidence of the first few days of testimony in the immigration fraud trial of alleged terrorist Luis Posada Carriles—that the U.S. government is doing its damnedest to lose the case.
While the notion that prosecutors don’t want to win is almost certainly unfair, the reality is that prosecutor Jerome J. Teresinski’s performance with his first witness this week was—to be charitable—stunningly inept.
And his first witness, Gina Garrett-Jackson—the Miami-based Homeland Security lawyer who handled Posada’s 2005 asylum application—didn’t help the cause.
Teresinski, who one reporter described as looking like a young Robert Duvall, began by introducing one version of Posada’s asylum application without explaining there were, in fact, two identical but different-dated applications.
Which gave the defence a chance to muddify the legal waters almost before the first question had been asked.
Once that was cleared up and the exhibit properly introduced, Teresinski asked Garrett-Jackson a series of open-ended questions that allowed her, perhaps encouraged her, to ramble and answer questions he hadn’t asked. Justice Kathleen Cardone admonished both the lawyer and the witness to stick to the standard legal process of specific question-answer, question-answer.
That ate up his first afternoon. Thursday morning he tried another tack, asking Garrett-Jackson to read sections of the transcripts of Posada’s various hearings to herself—while the jury stared at the ceiling—and then proceeded to ask her confirmatory questions about what she’d just read.
After the defence objected, he switched course and asked the witness to read chunks of the transcript directly into the record. But he went back to the beginning and asked her about all the same passages he’d quizzed her on earlier.
When the defence objected again—this time to the witness’s intonations when she read—Teresinski switched gears one final time and played audio-taped excerpts—of the same material the jury had already heard twice in other forms—for the jury members who followed along on headphones.
By the time Teresinski finally managed to finish his direct examination of the witness—a witness whose job was simply to set the stage for the battle to come—there was less than an hour left in the day for the defence to begin its cross-examination.
Since the court won’t be sitting Friday and Monday is the Martin Luther King holiday in the U.S., the trial won’t resume until Tuesday. At this pace, joked judge Kathleen Cardone at one point, proceedings could drag on for two years. While that’s unlikely, the predictions of a four-to-six week trial are beginning to seem optimistic.
Court observers seemed perplexed by the government’s stumbling start.
The reality is that the three front-and-centre lawyers on the government side—Teresinski, lead prosecutor Timothy J. Reardon III and Bridget Behling—are all ostensibly high-powered trial attorneys with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Counterterrorism Section, National Security Division, in Washington, and were parachuted into El Paso specifically to handle this case.
None of which is to suggest the war is lost. Trials have their own ebb and flow, and the government can certainly recover its momentum and equilibrium. But the reality is that they are not off to an auspicious start.
Copyright 2011 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Posada trial, Day 3: Opening arguments, the Bill Clinton sex defence
Laying the groundwork for what sounded very much like a Bill Clinton “I-did-not-have-sex-with-that-woman” defence, Luis Posada’s lawyer insisted today his client “told the truth… told substantially the truth on the major questions” that U.S. prosecutors insist he lied about.
During opening arguments at Posada’s trial on charges he lied during his 2005 immigration application, Arturo Hernandez attempted to parse the words “soliciting” and “arranging”—which Posada denied he did in relation to a 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign—as “terms of art."
He also said that during a 1998 interview with journalist Ann Louise Bardach, when Posada claimed credit for the bombings, he was simply taking “overall responsibility as the world’s most well known anti-Castro activist... the dean of anti-Castro opponents” for what was, in reality "an inside operation."
Hernandez also served notice he plans to attack the credibility of key prosecution witnesses, calling one a “Cuban spy” and dismissing another as a man who had “dated Castro’s daughter.” He described journalist Bardach, who is scheduled to testify, as a “biased individual” and said it’s a “known fact” that the New York Times for which she wrote the story often has a “pro-Castro” bias.
But the judge prevented Hernandez—for the moment at least—from directly making one of his other key arguments: that Cuba has a 50-year track record of “fabricating evidence,” including at the trial of the Cuban Five and in eight other instances.
Judge Kathleen Cardone ruled he could not use that material in his opening statement. She said the defence could introduce such evidence later in the trial, but only if it can lay a legal foundation for it. “That’s a high burden,” she added.
In contrast to the dapper, avuncular Hernandez’s impassioned hour-long presentation, chief prosecutor Timothy Reardon III, a balding man with a grey fringe who normally walks with a cane but limped, cane-less, during his presentation this morning, spoke slowly and deliberately during his 30-minute opening statement.
“This is a case about lying and choice,” he told the jurors, and proceeded to take them through the chronology of the case from March 18, 2005 when the prosecution says Posada arrived in Miami by boat—Posada told officials he had entered the U.S. near Houston after paying $10,000 to a "coyote" or illegal alien smuggler—to the superseding indictment filed against Posada in April 2009.
Summing up the government's case, Reardon quoted Scottish author Walter Scott: "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive."
The case continues.
More later...
Copyright 2011 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
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About
This is the site for What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, collected research and other materials for an in-progress narrative nonfiction book about the Cuban Five by Stephen Kimber.
The Cuban Five were members of "La Red Avispa"—the Wasp Network—spies Havana dispatched to Florida in the early 1990s to infiltrate militant anti-Castro exile groups that Cuba believed were plotting terrorist attacks on its soil. The Cuban Five were arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to long prison terms in the United States.
In the United States, they are virtually unknown. In Cuba, they are heroes.
That’s the short version of the story. The long version is… well, more complicated... Stay tuned.
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