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
U.S. says no prisoner swap
The Miami Herald has published the text of a letter from the U.S. Departments of State and Justice to Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.) regarding rumours the Cuban government might be willing to exchange an American contractor it is holding in exchange for members of the Cuban Five. The letter:
Dear Congressman Díaz-Balart:
Thank you for your letter of Sept. 1, which expressed your concern about reports alleging that the Cuban government is offering to free USAID subcontractor Alan Gross in exchange for convicted Cuban spy Gerardo Hernandez.
While we are committed to using every possible diplomatic channel to press for Mr. Gross' release, we have not and will not consider a "prisoner swap" with any of the five Cuban spies who participated in the Wasp network.
We agree that Alan Gross' efforts to provide global Internet access to the Jewish community in Cuba and other marginalized groups do not compare and are not in any way linked with the grave crimes of which the so-called Cuban Five have been convicted.
Thank you for sharing your concerns and providing us the opportunity to clarify our position on this matter. We hope this information is helpful. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.
Sincerely,
Richard Verma, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Legislative Affairs, U.S. Department of State.
Ronald Weich Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legislative Affairs, U.S. Department of Justice
The Cuban government alleges that Gross, who has been held since last December but has not been charged, entered the country illegally to distribute satellite communications equipment to "mercenary" dissidents.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Erikson, the “absurdly unsuccessful” embargo, the Five and the future
Erikson
The author of the acclaimed book Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States and the Next Revolution is the new Senior Advisor in the U.S. State Department’s Western Hemisphere Affairs office.
What—if anything—does Daniel P. Erikson’s appointment last week mean for the future of U.S-Cuban relations—and the fate of the Cuban Five?
While the Miami Herald says Erikson’s duties are “still being defined,” the newspaper adds the former Senior Associate with the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington is “likely to play at least some role in carrying out the diplomatic side of the Obama administration's policies on Cuba.”
The Cuba Wars
Erikson’s Cuba Wars won Foreword Magazine’s 2008 Political Science Book of the Year award and praise from a diverse collection of American critics. The Nation called it “sharp and deeply reported.” Foreign Affairs described it as “an eloquent cry for more realistic, decent responses that help—rather than further punish—the long-suffering Cuban People.” And the Associated Press lauded it as “a complete, insightful and fair-minded look at American policies toward Cuba.”
The question is whether being fair-minded matters when it comes to Cuban-American relations.
The best clues to that question may be in Eriskon’s own writing.
Erikson rightly describes the 50-year U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, for example, as “absurdly unsuccessful,” and pointedly notes the hypocrisy that “tens of millions of [U.S.] dollars have been spent on Radio and TV Marti broadcasts intended to break through the Castro regime’s ‘information blockade,’ but the average American is banned from traveling to the island.”
He pins much of the blame for the logic-clanging dissonance in U.S. policy on the Cuban-American lobby, which—despite its 50-year track record of abysmal failure to topple Fidel Castro, or do much else other than get in the way—still exerts a bizarrely out-of-whack-with-global-reality influence over America’s Cuba policy.
Consider Erikson’s pre-new-job take on two specific cases:
- In his book, Erikson acknowledges that Cuba dispatched the Cuban Five to Florida “to keep an eye out for threats to the island that emanated from Cuban exiles.” While he is far from sympathetic to their current plight—he declares, without irony, that “they faced the full brunt of the American legal process, which found them guilty on all counts”—he acknowledges the real reason the Five seem “destined to remain behind bars” is the power of the Cuban-American lobby, “especially given the incendiary nature of the case in Miami.”
- His analysis of the case of Luis Posada Carriles is equally dark. Erikson points out that Posada’s 2005 return to the United States “created a fiasco for the Bush administration.” But he says it ultimately decided to treat the acknowledged terrorist with prosecutorial “kid gloves and face the charge of hypocrisy” rather than put him on trial “and risk embarrassing revelations and an explosion of outrage in Miami.”
Why all this concern with what a bunch of aging, obsessive exiles in Miami think?
Erikson answered that question too. “It is far from clear that the strong Democratic majorities in the 111th Congress will herald much change on Cuba policy,” he concluded shortly after the 2008 elections, “especially since the Cuban-American lobbies that favor the embargo actively gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to both Republican and Democratic congressional candidates during the last election cycle. ”
Oh yes, that...
Or consider Barak Obama. During the last presidential campaign, Obama sent mixed signals. He expressed a willingness to begin “direct dialogue without pre-conditions” with the Cuban government and promised to support lifting restrictions on family members traveling or sending money to relatives in Cuba. But, in his major campaign speech on Latin American policy—to a well-connected, well-heeled Cuban American audience, it should be noted—he insisted he would maintain that same “absurdly unsuccessful” embargo.
Given that Obama became “the first presidential candidate to win [Florida] since the end of the Cold War while campaigning on a platform that moved, even gingerly, in the direction of greater engagement with Cuba,” and that his eventual Electoral College margin of victory was so significant he didn’t need Florida’s usually critical 27 electoral votes,” you might think Obama could finally change all that.
Erikson did. He argued in The Cuba Wars that Obama “had tremendous political scope of action to break through the “traditional animosity guiding U.S. relations with Cuba. The question,” he added sagely, "was whether he would choose to use it.”
So far, the verdict is decidedly mixed. Obama has eased some family travel restrictions and there are hopes people-to-people openings will continue to expand. But the administration has shown no signs—publicly at least—that it is ready top lift the useless trade embargo or negotiate a deal to free the Cuban Five.
Still, IPS, the Inter-Press Service, reported this week on rumours in Cuba that the Archbishop of Havana, Jaime Ortega, "may be mediating" negotiations to trade the Five for Alan Gross, the U.S. government contractor being held in Havana on allegations he entered the country illegally to distribute telecommunicatoons equipment to dissidents. That, coupled with Fidel Castro's recent public musings that the Five would be freed by the end of the year, has prompted renewed hope about the case.
But it is still faint. That’s because there is another presidential election looming, which will almost certainly be a closer contest than in 2008 , which means Florida’s anti-Castro warriors may matter more this time.
Which is why even the appointment of a moderate like Erikson seems unlikely to dramatically alter the stale state of Cuban-American relations.
That may not make foreign policy—or even common—sense but, as Daniel P. Erikson has demonstrated, when it comes to Cuba making sense doesn’t matter much at all.
Copyright 2010 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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