Fidel May Be Part of Terror Campaign
There are signs that Castro's new alignment with fundamentalist Islam could go beyond
crowd-pleasing declarations.
By Martin Arostegui Media Credit: Ali Khalig/UPI
Unholy alliance: In Tehran, Castro was welcomed with open arms by Iranian President
Khatami on May 8.
At 6:30 p.m. on Sept. 14, Ana Belen Montes, a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA), walked into a public telephone booth outside Washington's National Zoo and
made two calls to pager numbers later traced by federal agents to Cuba's Directorate of
General Intelligence (DGI).
She already had compromised the identities of CIA agents, revealed U.S. military secrets
and exposed the contents of classified files. But, as Montes sent repeated signals to her
DGI handlers during the days immediately following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the
Pentagon and the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the FBI was given orders to act.
The Sept. 21 arrest of a Fidel Castro mole deeply burrowed into the U.S. defense
establishment at such a moment, even as weapons-grade anthrax was being mailed to media
and congressional targets, raises serious questions about a possible Cuban connection with
the international terrorist conspiracy targeting the United States.
Concerns about Cuba's continuing threat to U.S. national security were voiced recently by
the DIA director, Vice Adm. Tom Wilson. Before entering a closed session of the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence he told reporters that "Cuba could initiate
information warfare or computer-network attacks that could seriously disrupt our
military."
While there has been a tendency to play down Castro's capabilities to engage the United
States in asymmetrical warfare, "they are getting renewed attention in the light of
recent events," according to a Pentagon source. The source tells Insight that only a
highly sophisticated espionage network, such as the one operating from Cuba, could have
cracked the code of Air Force One in an apparent breach of security that caused U.S.
Secret Service officials to whisk the president out of sight on the morning of Sept. 11.
A sudden decision by Russian President Vladimir Putin to shut down Russia's electronic
listening station at Lourdes near Havana by next year, announced just hours before his
meeting with President George W. Bush at the Oct. 19 economic summit in Shanghai,
"reflects the degree of alarm over Cuba's intelligence operations," according to
a U.S. defense analyst in Washington. Congress already was threatening to freeze financial
aid to Moscow unless it dismantled the intelligence facility that gives Castro a degree of
international leverage out of proportion to the bankrupt state of his communist regime.
Despite some residual support for Castro in the Kremlin, a Cuban delegation visiting
Moscow to procure additional funding for the Lourdes facility abruptly was dismissed with
the announcement that instead the listening post would be closed. Influential elements in
Moscow fear that the rogue use of Cuban spy facilities could drag Russia into an unwanted
confrontation with Washington. According to Cuban exile Ernesto Betancourt, some Russian
officials were highly disturbed by a 1999 incident recorded by the Federal Communications
Commission in which Cuban electronic-warfare specialists penetrated New York's
air-traffic-control system by simulating U.S. Air Force flight codes. The signals, which
seriously threatened to disrupt air traffic, were traced to a 1,500 kilowatt transmitter
operating west of Havana.
As Russia and the United States try to close ranks against the common threat posed by
Muslim terrorist networks in Central Asia, say intelligence insiders, Castro's growing
ties with radical Islamic movements have become a source of worry for both governments.
During his recent tour of Syria, Libya, Iran, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and
Malaysia, the Cuban dictator told a cheering crowd of Muslim students at the University of
Tehran, "Together we will bring America to its knees."
Agence France-Presse reported that Castro, in an apocalyptic speech on May 10, told his
Muslim audience in Iran: "America is weak. I have studied its weaknesses from very
close by. I tell you, the imperialist king will finally fall." Following the Sept. 11
attacks, Castro followed the lead of hard-line Muslim leaders by blaming "this
tragedy" on "the terrorist policies of the United States."
There are signs that Castro's new alignment with fundamentalist Islam could go beyond
crowd-pleasing declarations. U.S. law-enforcement agencies have indications that Cuba may
have assisted the logistics and planning for the latest wave of terrorist attacks. Insight
has learned that al-Qaeda ringleader Mohammed Atta, who organized the Sept. 11 attacks and
crashed a
hijacked airliner into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, may have met
secretly with Cuban undercover agents shortly after his arrival in the United States last
year. The Czech government has confirmed that Atta similarly had met with Iraqi
intelligence officers in Prague.
Federal investigators believe that Castro had been exploiting the international
controversy unleashed by the Elian Gonzalez case to flood the United States with
intelligence agents — including high-level officials of Cuba's biological-warfare
program who allegedly spoke with Atta at a Miami motel. Federal investigators suspect that
Atta's Cuban contact was a top defense-ministry officer with personal ties to Castro who
entered the United States under cover of assignment to a Cuban-government delegation
escorting Elian's two grandmothers, who supposedly were coming to mediate the custody
battle.
"Information which Atta's al-Qaeda cells readily possessed on flight schools, airport
security and airline flight patterns only could have been obtained through an intelligence
infrastructure already in place," says a federal law-enforcement official. FBI
affidavits filed in connection with the roundup of a Cuban spy ring involved in the 1996
shootdown of two small aircraft over the straits of Florida charge the Cuban DGI with
conducting espionage against U.S. military and civil aviation through a network of some
300 agents operating across the continent.
Exchanges between bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and Cuban intelligence also could involve
the provision of weaponized biological strains produced by Cuba's extensive
chemical/biological warfare facilities exposed by Insight three years ago (see "Fidel
Castro's Deadly Secret," July 20, 1998). Kenneth Alibek, who developed anthrax as
deputy director of the Soviet biological
warfare Biopreperat program, says in his book Biohazard, published last year, that Castro
has since been running an advanced biological-weapons program administered by scientists
trained in Moscow in the 1990s.
Reports smuggled out by Cuban dissident scientists confirm that Castro's research has
concentrated on developing undetectable methods of spreading deadly bacteria, including
the use of contaminated bird flocks. Cuba, meanwhile, has been engaging in scientific
exchanges with Iraq, say these scientists. A year ago, Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage
opened a biotechnological research-and-development plant in Iran, paving the way for
Castro's visit to that country last May.
Atta's dealings with the DGI are not the only contacts reported between Cuba's military
intelligence and al-Qaeda. The Associated Press reported on March 4, 2000, that a young
Afghani who trained at a camp run by bin Laden in northeast Afghanistan says he saw
advisers there from Chechnya, Sudan, Libya, Iran, North Korea and Cuba. Some of these
foreigners, he said, had brought biological/chemical weapons, which were stored in caves.
Three Afghani nationals and suspected al-Qaeda members caught trying to deposit $2 million
in a bank in the Cayman Islands last August were found to have entered the British colony
on a commercial flight from nearby Cuba using false Pakistani passports. British
authorities who arrested the three men believe that they were handling drug proceeds
laundered in Havana.
Colombia's former national police chief, Gen. Rosso José Serrano, maintains that Cuba
also has facilitated contacts between radical Muslim militants and leftist Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas. Serrano says that about 100 Afghanis have
entered Colombia during the last decade to introduce cultivation of heroin poppies in
guerrilla-held areas. An Egyptian terrorist belonging to al-Gamal al-Islamiya — who
was wanted in connection with the 1997 massacre of 80 Western tourists near Cairo —
entered Colombia illegally in 1998 to hold talks with FARC and was arrested and turned
over to U.S. authorities.
Cuban biological/chemical-warfare technology also has been detected in Colombia. A FARC
bomb that burned out the lungs of an entire police garrison in the Colombian town of San
Adolfo last September contained chlorine-based poison gas, according to a lab analysis of
the device. Some 20 Cuban military advisers currently are operating with FARC, according
to Colombian army intelligence. It also has intercepted guerrilla radio communications in
which FARC's military commander, Jorge Briceno, alias "Mono Jojoy," talks about
forming an "anti-imperialist front" to launch terrorist attacks against targets
in the United States. "To take away their economic resources wherever they may be,
reach into North America and get to their own territory," says Briceno, "to make
them feel the pain which they have inflicted on others."
In September, meanwhile, as Montes frantically transmitted information to her DGI
spymasters through Cuba's mission to the United Nations, according to an FBI affidavit,
Castro was ordering a military alert in Cuba and calling up reserves. A CIA psychiatric
profiler who has studied Castro's personality believes that the Cuban dictator was
displaying "geriatric overexertion." But top intelligence specialists tell
Insight that Castro may have had reasons to fear a possible U.S. retaliation when
President George W. Bush declared his war on terrorism.
"Tours through radical Islamic states by Castro and his close Venezuelan ally,
President Hugo Chavez, in the months prior to the September attacks indicate some level of
complicity or knowledge of what was going to happen," says Lisette Bustamante, a
former aide to Castro who currently works on the Spanish daily newspaper La Razon.
Not only were statements by both leaders in their Middle Eastern trips laced with violent
anti-American rhetoric, Bustamante points out, but Chavez quite candidly told reporters
that his talks with Saddam Hussein and heads of other oil-producing states involved the
creation of a "new anti-imperialist axis" against Western industrialized
economies.
It was just the sort of anti-American blather that tends to excite the faithful remnant of
the old-guard communists, say U.S. intelligence analysts. Mysterious predictions about
some catastrophic event in the United States began to circulate in the electronic traffic
and even were voiced by Russia's Pravda on Aug. 1 under the headline, "The Dollar and
the U.S. Will Fall." Based on interviews with the Malaysian ambassador to Moscow and
a group of Russian economists, the report was taken seriously enough for members of
Russia's parliament, the Duma, to advise Russian citizens to cash out dollars.
An adviser to the Duma's Commission on Economic Politics, Tatyana Koryagina, even
specified late August or early September as the likely time for an attack on the United
States that would lead to its economic collapse.
Martin Arostegui is a free-lance writer for Insight magazine. Thanks to Elians Dolphins
for this report
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