The Longest Romance

by Humberto Fontova

  “Canada’s Sherritt works quietly in Washington … recently it has given money to a former State Department employee, Phil Peters, to advance its interests. The money to Peters goes through contributions to the Lexington Institute, where Peters is a vice president. Because the Lexington Institute is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit, there is no public record of Sherritt’s funding. This has allowed Peters to advise and direct the Cuba Working Group (a Congressional anti-embargo cabal) in ways beneficial to Sherritt while presenting himself to the Group as an objective think-tank scholar with a specialization in Cuba.” 21

  In brief: one of the Castro regime’s top business partners funnels under-the-table payments to America’s top anti-embargo publicist, who is invariably billed as an “impartial, scholarly expert” in every media mention.

  Nick Schwellenbach, a former investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, also uncovered incriminating items regarding the Lexington Institute’s funding. Some of these were included in an investigative report by the Mobile Press-Register on Phil Peters’s colleague Loren Thompson, the institute’s “defense expert.” Thompson is consulted by the media on defense-spending matters almost as often as Peters is on Cuban matters.

  “What is often not revealed in news reports, ”Schwellenbach discloses, “is that almost all funding for Thompson’s employer, the non-profit Lexington Institute, comes from the same defense contractors who frequently have a stake in the programs that he writes about.” When confronted with the evidence, “Thompson readily confirmed that the institute receives ‘quite a significant’ level of support from defense contractors, including similar amounts from Boeing and Los Angeles-based Northrop.... That fact is not mentioned on the institute’s Web site, however, and Thompson would not provide specific dollar amounts. Boeing and Northrop spokesmen later also declined to say how much their firms give.... ” 22

  In keeping with this time-honored Lexington Institute fund-raising tradition, might Peters’s honorariums also issue from parties with a stake in the issues he writes and talks about? We hardly expect the Castro regime to fess up in the manner of Boeing and Norththrop. But the court-discovery document provides a pretty good clue.

  CHAPTER 16

  “Agents of Influence”—Castro’s Ladies and Men in the U.S. Media

  On September 20, 2001, the FBI arrested the enemy spy that had managed the deepest penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in history. The spy’s name is Ana Montes and during her 15 years in the Defense Intelligence Agency she operated as an agent for Fidel Castro. At the time of her arrest she had moled her way to the head of the DIA’s Latin America division. From here, she greatly influenced (if not actually directed) the Clinton administration’s Cuba policy. Today she serves a 25-year sentence in federal prison. She was convicted of “conspiracy to commit espionage,” the same charge against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg carrying the same potential death sentence for what is widely considered the most damaging espionage case since the so-called end of the Cold War. Montes dodged the Rosenbergs’ fate primarily through a plea bargain.1

  ““Ana Montes compromised our entire program against Cuba, electronic as well as human,” admitted Joel F. Brenner, a national counterintelligence executive. She “passed some of our most sensitive information about Cuba back to Havana,” disclosed then undersecretary for international security, John Bolton.2

  Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Simmons of the DIA had a key role in uncovering Fidel Castro’s “queen jewel,” as she came to be known, and sending her to prison. Two years later Castro had cause to curse Simmons again. “Virtually every member of Cuba’s UN mission is an intelligence agent,” revealed Alcibiades Hidalgo, who defected to the U.S. in 2002 after serving as Raul Castro’s chief of staff and Cuba’s ambassador to the UN.3 In 2003 Lieut. Col. Simmons helped root out 14 of those Cuban spies, who were promptly expelled from the U.S.

  In 23 years as a U.S. military counterintelligence officer, Lieut. Col. Simmons has ended the operations of 80 enemy agents, many of whom are today behind bars. “I believe that the Cuban intelligence service has penetrated the United States government to the same extent that the old East German Stasi once penetrated the West German government,” he said in an interview in 2008.

  Retired from the DIA, Lieut. Col. Simmons is now an active reserve officer and a national security consultant who specializes in outing Castro’s “agents of influence” in the U.S. “For Cuba, being able to influence policy and elite opinion-makers is equally important—possibly even more important than recruiting spies with access to intelligence information,” asserts Norman Bailey, who worked for the office of the director of National Intelligence. That makes Chris Simmons a busy man.

  Among the agents of influence identified by Lieut. Col. Simmons are:

  *Julia Sweig, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of its Latin America studies division;

  *Retired professor Gillian Gunn-Clissold, who headed Georgetown University’s Cuba Study Group and served as assistant director of Caribbean programs at Trinity College;

  *Professor Alberto Coll, ex-deputy assistant secretary of Defense (1990-93), former professor at the Naval War College, series host of the History Channel and now professor at DePaul University.

  *Professor Marifeli Perez-Stable, currently teaching at Florida International University, on the editorial staff of The Miami Herald and Vice president of the Washington, DC-based think-tank, Inter-American Dialogue, a frequent source on Cuba issues for the mainstream media.4

  The media blackout on Chris Simmon’s bombshell has been total and understandable. For decades some of those he describes as Castro’s agents of influence have been the mainstream media’s favorite go-to Cuba experts for interviews, insights, prognostications and sound-bites on Cuba.

  Since Fidel Castro’s health “hiccup” in the summer of 2006, a cursory search shows that Cuba “experts” from the Inter-American Dialogue have been prime sources for stories by the following news outlets: Reuters, The Associated Press, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, NPR, Time, Newsweek, The Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, the International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, the Brookings Institute, Foreign Affairs magazine, Forbes and the Latin Business Chronicle. Throw in the London Daily Telegraph, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s Globe and Mail and Der Spiegel for good measure.

  When PBS ran an “American Series” special on Fidel Castro in 2005, most of the show involved an interview with Marifeli Perez-Stable, who is also a member of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations as well as Mexico’s Council on Foreign Relations.

  According to Chris Simmons, Dr. Perez-Stable also worked as an agent for Cuba’s DGI until the early 90’s, when a defecting Cuban intelligence officer blew her cover and ended her usefulness to the Castro regime. This defector had been Perez-Stable’s Cuban case-officer and Simmons saw the document naming her.5

  “I’m sick and tired of these McCarthyite tactics,” Perez-Stable was quoted in a Miami Herald article regarding Simmons’s accusation. “I supported the Cuban revolution in the 1970’s. Over the course of the 1980’s, I had a change of heart.”6

  Problem is, Chris Simmons cites a meeting by Ms. Perez-Stable with her Cuban case-officer held as late as mid-1991 in Ottawa, Canada.

  “This is nothing more than a witch hunt,” said Miami Herald editor Joe Oglesby about Simmons’s charges. “This is character-assassination and these issues have been raised and dealt with in the past.”7

  Yes, the issue has been raised in the past. Problem is, the only “dealing with it” by The Miami Herald was to bury it, look around furtively and hope that few noticed. In a written response to She Miami Herald, Professor Alberto Coll said: “‘These are baseless and scurrilous allegations without a shred of evidence, presented by someone eager to make a quick buck in Miami by selling his book.”8

  Problem is, in May, 2005 Professor Coll was found guilty of lying to f
ederal authorities about the purpose of a visit to Cuba. The Naval War College then suspended his access to classified material.

  So why aren’t these “agents of influence” either in jail or being prosecuted? I asked retired Lieut. Col. Simmons.

  “As a counterintelligence officer my job was to identify and neutralize foreign agents,” he explained, “to prevent them from doing more damage to my country. One way to accomplish this is to get a conviction for not registering as agents of a foreign government. This usually takes hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. But it’s often easier, also easier on the taxpayer, to simply neutralize them by ‘outing’ the ones who knowingly had contacts with Cuban intelligence agencies and putting both them and their media cohorts on full alert that U.S counterintelligence is on to their game. I’ve obviously received clearance to mention the above names.”9

  That element of knowing is crucial. The Castro regime is famous for the hospitality provided by the official hosts and attendants it assigns the thousands upon thousands of U.S. visitors—legislators, scholars, journalists, ecclesiastics, businessmen, cultural ambassadors—who somehow breach the brutal “U.S. blockade” every year to visit Cuba. Point is, virtually every official visitor to Cuba from the U.S. has some form of contact with Cuban intelligence. But most are unaware of the true professional identity of their charming guides, dinner companions, taxi drivers, etc.

  Chris Simmons also based his accusations against the Inter-American Dialogue’s vice president partly on an FBI debriefing of a Cuban intelligence defector named Jesus Perez-Mendez, who had worked closely with Dr. Perez-Stable’s Cuban case-officer. This defector revealed that in the early 80’s Cuba’s DGI appointed Dr. Perez-Stable as head of a division within their “Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples” (ICAP, in Spanish), which fronted as an “educational” and “cultural-exchange” group. “The DGI prepared Perez-Stable’s annual schedule in the U.S.,” disclosed Perez-Mendez. “She receives $100 for every tourist that travels to Cuba with this group.”10

  This same ICAP, by the way, sponsored the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s visit to Cuba in 1984. So it’s likely that Jeremiah Wright unwittingly earned Ms. Marifeli Perez-Stable a C-note—and tax-free, it appears.

  JEREMIAH WRIGHT’S CUBAN FRIENDS

  “I have been affiliated with the Cuban Council of Churches since the 1980s,” boasted Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a sermon on July 16, 2006. “I have several close Cuban friends who work with the Cuban Council of Churches and you have heard me preach about our affiliation and the Black Theology Project’s trips to Cuba. The Cuban Council of Churches has been a non-partisan global mission partner for decades. I have worked with them for two decades.”11

  Non-partisan, Reverend Wright? Not according to Cuban intelligence defector Juan Vives, who from hands-on experience reports that the Cuban Council of Churches is in fact an arm of Cuba’s ICAP, itself an arm of Cuba’s KGB-founded and mentored DGI. The ICAP’s long-time chieftain was Rene Rodriguez Cruz, who by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s own admission might have been one of his “friends.”

  Rodriguez’s meteoric rise through Cuba’s Stalinist bureaucracy was facilitated by his diligence as an early executioner, often beating out even Che Guevara and Raul Castro in his zeal to shatter the firing-squad victim’s skull with a coup de grace from his .45. On November 5, 1982 a Dade County, Florida, grand jury indicted Rene Rodriguez Cruz for smuggling drugs into the U.S.

  This murderer headed a Cuban agency that Jeremiah Wright “worked with for decades” by his own admission, and whose staff he regards as “friends.” These friends arranged the visit for the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his 300-person entourage to Havana in 1984, which included Rev. Wright.

  “Viva Fidel!” bellowed Reverend Jackson while concluding his speech at the University of Havana during that visit. “Viva Che Guevara! Long live our cry of freedom!”12

  “He [Jesse Jackson] is a great personality,” reciprocated a beaming Fidel Castro, “a brilliant man with a great talent, capable of communicating with people, very persuasive, reliable, and honest. Jackson’s main characteristic is honesty. He is sincere and there is not a single bit of demagoguery in his conversations.”

  You gotta love that last point.

  STEPHEN COLBERT’S FAVORITE CUBA “EXPERT”

  “Julia Sweig is director for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.” (NPR)

  “Julia Sweig heads the Latin American division for the Council on Foreign Relations.” (Stephen Colbert)

  “Julia E. Sweig is senior fellow and director of Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.” (New York Times)

  When Stephen Colbert introduced Julia Sweig on his show—July 15, 2008, and May 11, 2009—as the head of the Council on Foreign Relations Latin American division he was correct but incomplete. After all, this is the same brief bio used for Julia Sweig by the Daily Beast, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NPR, PBS and the many other media-outlets that feature her expertise. None of these mentions that she also boasts warm friendship and close collaboration with Castroite terrorists whose plans for New York would have put the death-toll from 9/11 in second place. Some background:

  On November 17, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI cracked a plot by Cuban agents that targeted Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s and Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The explosions were timed for the following week, the day after Thanksgiving. Macy’s gets 50,000 shoppers that one day.

  Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children—given the date and targets, probably mostly women and children—were to be incinerated and entombed.

  At the time, the FBI relied heavily on HUMINT (human intelligence). They’d expertly penetrated the plot, identified the ringleaders and had them tapped. One by one the ringleaders were ambushed and arrested. Among these were Cuban DGI agents Jose Gomez Abad and Elsa Montero, who worked as “diplomats” in Cuba’s UN mission. Alas, they enjoyed “diplomatic immunity” and were soon back in Cuba as heroes instead of in the electric chair at Sing Sing.

  The FBI speculated that as many as 30 others might have been in on the plot, but the above-named were the head honchos. The intent and will of those Castroite terrorists to commit mass-murder was certainly present; only our crackerjack FBI of the time foiled it.

  We turn now to the acknowledgments in Julia Sweig’s award-winning book published in 2003, entitled Inside the Cuban Revolution:

  “In Cuba many people spent long hours with me, helped open doors I could not have pushed through myself, and offered friendship and warmth to myself during research trips to the island . . . Elsa Montero and Jose Gomez Abad championed this project.”

  Sweig also thanks Ramon Sanchez Parodi, Jose Antonio Arbesu, Fernando Miguel Garcia, Hugo Ernesto Yedra and Josefina Vidal for their “warmth, their friendship and their kindness in opening Cuban doors.”

  Chris Simmons identifies every one of the above as Cuban DGI agents. Josefina Vidal was booted from the U.S. in 2003 for espionage, after Simmons himself fingered her.

  “The main interest of the book,” gushed London’s prestigious Financial Times about Julia Sweig’s Inside the Cuban Revolution, “is that it is primarily based on original interviews and previously inaccessible records.”

  No doubt. But might KGB-trained officials in the service of a Stalinist regime possibly have had an agenda during those interviews and in cherry-picking which records to disclose—not to mention welcoming Sweig into Cuba to begin with?

  I haven’t checked Guinness, but effusively thanking ten different intelligence agents of a terror-sponsoring enemy nation in your book’s acknowledgements—three of whom were expelled from the U.S. for terrorism or espionage—must be some kind of record, at least for someone outside a maximum-security federal prison.

  Not that in media eyes this affects Sweig’s position as an impartial expert on issues pertaini
ng to the terror-sponsoring enemy nation. “A nonpartisan resource for information and analysis,” boasts the intro to the Council on Foreign Relations, which features Julia Sweig as its Latin America expert.

  “In 1998, a comprehensive review by the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Cuba does not pose a threat to U.S. national security,” states the Council on Foreign Relations website. Perhaps overlooked by the Council is that this comprehensive review was authored by the Clinton Defense Department’s Ana Montes, who dodged the fate of the Rosenbergs with a plea-bargain and is currently serving a 25-year stretch in federal prison for the crime of espionage. The Montes case ranks as the most damaging (for us) spy case since the “end” of the Cold War.

  In September 2010 The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg’s copped the first interview with Fidel Castro since the Stalinist dictator’s near-death crisis in 2006. Goldberg thanked Julia Sweig for arranging the visit, describing her as “a friend at the Council on Foreign Relations” and “a preeminent expert on Cuba and Latin America.”

  “We shook hands,” writes Goldberg about meeting Castro. “Then he greeted Julia warmly. They [Castro and Sweig] have known each other for more than 20 years.” (emphasis mine)

  CHAPTER 17

  Barbara Walters, Charmed by the Hemisphere’s Top Torturer of Women

  “Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly, even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell)

  “Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful.” (ABC’s Barbara Walters)