Bill Gertz wrote an article entitled “CIA Fooled by Massive Cold War Double-Agent Failure” which was published in the Washington Free Beacon website on December 28, 2015. He explained how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was fooled by almost a hundred double agents pretending to be working for the agency but secretly worked for communist spy agencies during the Cold War and beyond, according to Benjamin B. Fischer, a former CIA analyst, operations officer, and historian.
Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union (and later Russia) successfully placed in the CIA nearly 100 fake CIA recruits who supplied false intelligence that was passed on to senior U.S. officials for decades. Benjamin B. Fischer wrote in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence the following: “During the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency bucked the law of averages by recruiting double agents on an industrial scale; it was hoodwinked not a few but many times. The result was a massive but largely ignored intelligence failure. The failure to recognize the double agents and their disinformation designed to influence U.S. policies wreaked havoc on the agency.”
Gertz pointed out that Fischer stated that the failure to prevent the double agent deception was dismissed by the CIA as “insignificant,” and that congressional oversight committees did not press the agency to reform its recruiting of foreign agents. Fischer was a career CIA officer who joined the CIA in 1973 and worked in the Soviet affairs division during the Cold War. He later sued the agency in 1996, charging that he was mistreated for criticizing the CIA for mishandling the 1994 case of CIA officer Aldrich Ames, a counterintelligence official, who was a long time KGB agent.
Former CIA agent Aldrich Ames was a counterintelligence official who was unmasked as a long time KGB plant. Ames was spying for Moscow since the 1980s. He was arrested in 1994.
Gertz explained that double agents are foreigners who are recruited by a spy agency but are secretly loyal to another spy agency. They are used to provide false disinformation and to extract secrets while pretending to be loyal agents. Double agents are different than foreign penetration agents, or moles, who spy from within agencies while posing as career intelligence officers.
The bloody Castro brothers in Cuba were very successful in placing double agents in the CIA. Former Cuban intelligence Major Florentino Aspillaga, who defected to the CIA in 1987, revealed that “some four-dozen CIA recruits over a 40-year period secretly had been working for the communist government in Havana and supplying disinformation to the CIA.” Later that year, Cuban state television reported in a documentary the existence of 27 phony CIA agents, along with their secret CIA communications and photographic gear. The catastrophic intelligence failure was covered up by the congressional intelligence oversight committees, according to Fischer.
Gertz wrote that in East Germany, all the recruited CIA agents working there were found to be double-agents working secretly for the Ministry of State Security spy service, also known as the Stasi. Fischer said the controlled East German assets “rendered U.S. intelligence deaf, dumb, and blind.” The late East German spymaster Markus Wolf wrote in his memoir that by the late 1980s “we were in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been turned into a double agent or working for us from the start.” He added that “On our orders they were all delivering carefully selected information and disinformation to the Americans.”
Fischer wrote that former U.S. intelligence officials confirmed the failure, including former CIA Director Robert Gates and Bobby Ray Inman, a former deputy CIA director, who said the double agent fiasco spanned over 20 years. Fischer stated that the East German failure was “wall-to-wall,” due to the lack of advance warning in 1961 regarding the plans to build the Berlin Wall, and in 1989, cable television provided CIA with the first word that the wall was coming down.
Former CIA Director Robert Gates, as well as Bobby Ray Inman, a former deputy CIA director, said the agency was duped by double agents from Cuba and East Germany for over 20 years.
Gertz said that the last major double agent failure took place in the Soviet Union and, after its 1991 collapse, in Russia. It was revealed after the 1994 arrest of CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames for spying for Moscow since the 1980s. Ames helped the KGB expose all Soviet and East European intelligence operations, allowing Moscow to pass “feed material”—a combination of accurate information and false data—through controlled double-agents. The KGB operation involving Ames began in 1986 and continued through 1993 when he was handled by the post-Soviet SVR intelligence service.
Gertz stated the following: “In 1995, the CIA admitted that for eight years since 1986, it produced highly classified intelligence reports derived from bogus and tainted sources, including 35 reports that were based on data from double agents, and 60 reports compiled using sources that were suspected of being controlled by Moscow. The false information reached the highest levels of government, including three presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.” The CIA’s inspector general urged reprimands for several senior CIA officers and directors William H. Webster, Robert M. Gates, and R. James Woolsey. The three former directors claimed they should not be blamed for the compromises because they were unaware of them.
A major problem for the CIA Soviet operations was the failure of agency officers to successfully conduct direct recruitments of foreign agents to work for the CIA. Instead, the CIA was reliant on “walk-ins,” or volunteers, a practice that increased the vulnerability to foreign double agent operations.
Fischer blamed the bureaucratic culture and careerism at CIA for the failure to prevent the double agent disaster. He stated the following: “The case of the KGB-SVR double agents from 1986 to 1994 is egregious, not the least because it revealed that deceptive practices transcended the Cold War. The CIA continued to handle agents the CIA knew were fraudulent and allowed the division in charge of Soviet affairs to cover up the loss of all its bona fide agents. Yet none of these revelations resulted in a serious inquiry into the troubles that doubles cause. To paraphrase Lord Acton, secret power corrupts secretly.”
Angelo Codevilla, a former Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staff member and a senior fellow at the Claremont, said he was familiar with some of the details on the CIA double agents during his intelligence career but said some information in the article was new. He said that “Mitigating the dismay at the total corruption—moral, intellectual, and political—of the agency is my surprise that a man in Fischer’s position saw the reality so very clearly and so reports it.”
Kenneth E. deGraffenreid, a former senior White House intelligence official during the Reagan administration, stated the following: “What we thought was true from the Cold War spy wars was largely wrong, and that says that the counterintelligence model we had was wrong. And therefore because we’ve not corrected that problem we’re in bad shape to deal with the current challenges posed by terrorists and spies from Iran, Russia, China and others.” David Sullivan, a former CIA analyst and retired Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff member, said Fischer correctly explained that “intelligence officers have a saying that the only thing worse than knowing there is a mole in your organization is finding the mole.”
Germany Investigating Second U.S. Spy Suspect: Security Sources
A security source said that Germany is investigating a suspected U.S. spy in its military, days after the arrest of a member of its foreign intelligence agency as a double agent tested U.S. relations already strained by espionage. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday that if it proved to be true that the BND officer was spying for the United States, a NATO ally, it would be a “serious case”. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said the relationship between the U.S. and Germany is “incredibly important” and is built on mutual trust: The documents include details of a parliamentary committee’s investigation of former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden’s allegations that Washington carried out surveillance in Germany, including that of Chancellor Merkel’s telephone.
Inform
Terresa Monroe-Hamilton wrote an article titled “In from the Cold and out Again… How the CIA was Duped and their Double Agent Failure” which was posted on her website NoisyRoom.net on December 28, 2015. She said regarding the Gertz article that she was appalled that these double agents were not thoroughly vetted.
Monroe-Hamilton wrote the following: “The double agents were hurriedly turned and because of sloppiness, we invited the enemy into the midst of our intelligence agencies. It’s mind boggling. How’s that for national security? Feeling warm and fuzzy yet? What’s worse is that the CIA dismissed the infiltration by communists and the disinformation as insignificant. No one, including congressional oversight committees, pushed for reform in the agency when this was uncovered either. Their vetting processes still suck and they aren’t listening to the likes of Fischer… Lord only knows how many moles we have within our agencies.”
Monroe-Hamilton pointed out that the first major double agent failure was in Cuba. The Cubans are “notorious for using a variety of traps for agents from honey traps to straight up blackmail.” As explained earlier, no less than four dozen recruits over 40 years had been secretly working for communist Cuba while on the payroll of the CIA. These Cuban double agents supplied disinformation to the CIA, endangering agents and scuttling operations left and right.
Monroe-Hamilton stated the following: “This is the same government – Castro’s government – that Obama just reinstated relations with. Now, instead of being made fools by the communists, we just crawl into bed with them. It’s the other definition of coming in from the cold. You would think that would have set off alarms in the agency and caused them to adjust their vetting procedures. But you’d be wrong. Instead, the intelligence failure was covered up by congressional intelligence committees. You see the enemies within go way back. We willingly let the enemy in our doors and let them set up shop in our intelligence agencies and abroad. Is it any wonder we now have a Marxist in power who colludes with communist dictators and tyrants, as well as Islamists?”
Monroe-Hamilton concluded her article by stating the following: “How can we defend our country if we can’t even police our own intelligence agencies? And it goes far beyond them as well. All our government agencies and the federal government itself are infiltrated with communists and Islamists… from NASA, to our universities, to our military, to the seats of power in Congress… the U.S. is facing an existential problematic threat from within. The CIA is not the only one that has been duped here. The whole nation has been by Barack Obama and his comrades.”
Cuba’s Effective Use of its Spies and Diplomats Worldwide
Cuba has worked very effectively with the corrupt and dictators club that is the United Nations (U.N.) for decades. The brutal communist regime has served in the U.N. Council of Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland. Every year the U.N. General Assembly approves by an overwhelming margin a non-binding resolution introduced by Cuba against the U.S. commercial embargo imposed on the tyrannical Castro brothers’ regime since 1961. The U.S. embargo on Cuba came about after the Castro regime confiscated without compensation several billions of dollars in businesses and property belonging to Americans.
In spite of the many shameful and illegal unilateral concessions given to Cuba by President Barack Obama with nothing in return or without a “Quid Pro Quo,” as in known in diplomacy, the oppressive Cuban regime once again presented the anti-embargo resolution in 2015. The inept Obama even told the U.N. that he would continue to press Congress for the elimination of what is left of the embargo since he has already done a series of executive orders in violation of the Helms Burton Act to weaken the embargo.
One hundred and ninety-one countries (191) voted at the General Assembly of United Nations in favor of a resolution introduced by Cuba against the United States commercial embargo in 2015. Only two nations voted against the resolution, the United States and Israel.
It has been most unfortunate that the Republican–controlled Congress has not opposed the series of executive orders done by the president in violation of the Helms Burton Act to assist the undeserving brutal Cuban regime. When Secretary of State John Kerry recommended eliminating Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terror, at the request of President Obama on April 14, 2014, the Congress had 45 days to oppose this shameful recommendation.
Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen wanted to introduce legislation to reverse Obama’s ill-advised decision; However, sadly and shamefully she could not find support among Republicans in the House of Representatives. On May 29, 2015, Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terror was rescinded. It is no wonder that conservative Republicans in the nation detest the Republican establishment in Congress! Unfortunately, two Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Kentucky’s Senator Rand Paul, are in agreement with Obama’s New Cuban policy.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whose own State Department was also penetrated by spies working for Cuba, said during a campaign event at Florida International University in Miami that she would go much further that Obama in ending the embargo. Showing her contempt for the Constitution, Mrs. Clinton said that she would issue more executive to end the embargo once and for all. If she were to be elected president, it would be similar to a third term for the traitor Barack Obama.
Cuba continues to support terrorism with its large Cuban Occupation Army and intelligence services in Venezuela. This South American nation engages in drug trafficking worldwide and uses part of that money to fund Hezbollah, the Iranian militia in Lebanon. Cuba continues to provide sanctuary to many United States criminals who have murdered police officers, planted bombs, and hijacked airplanes in the United States. Cuba has denied requests from the United States to return these criminals to face justice in this nation.
Removing Cuba from this list was an enormous unilateral concession given by President Obama to the Castro brothers. Cuba now can apply for loans, that it will never repay, from international financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Incredibly, now the United States Naval Base in Guantánamo could begin buying goods and services from the Cuban government such as rum, cigars, and other supplies effective immediately.
Carlos Alberto Montaner wrote an article titled “Gulliver against 12,000 dwarfs” which was published in the Miami Herald on November 2, 2015. He explained how communist Cuba uses its enormous intelligence network to back Cuba’s diplomatic goals.
Montaner explained that the United States really did not defend itself at the United Nations since these U.N. resolutions are not binding. He wrote the following: “They are mere propaganda within an organization so discredited that it elected Venezuela and Ecuador to the committee that oversees human rights observance, effectively assigning the fox to watch over the chicken coop. What’s interesting is the way the Castro brothers manage to divert attention from the heart of the issue — the persistence of a Stalinist dictatorship derived from the Soviet model eradicated from the West a quarter of a century ago — and refocus it on a fabricated perception: an impoverished island besieged by the greatest power on earth. David against Goliath.”
Montaner pointed out that the Castro regime has about 12,000 people engaged in the task of promoting the causes selected by Fidel and Raúl Castro. These individuals are used to denounce the United States worldwide and in the United Nations. Cuba has worked and continues to work with all the enemies of the United States. The Cuban regime collaborates with Iran, Syria, Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and the rest of the Latin American countries that belong to the 21st century socialism under ALBA alliance. The Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence has 1,500 well-trained officers deployed worldwide and leads the effort to advance the Cuban agenda. Each intelligence officer recruits or handles a dozen local contacts.
Montaner said that the members of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) are another arm of the intelligence machine present in all countries and all international organizations. Cuba has 119 Cuban embassies in 140 sites, with 21 consulates general and all of them are controlled by General Directorate of Intelligence. Thus all Cuban diplomatic posts serve the intelligence function. The General Directorate of Intelligence works effectively with academic, literary, or artistic institutions that have contacts abroad and travel overseas or host travelers.
This writer served as an associate professor of social studies in the College of Education at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, Florida for 7 ½ years. A Cuban-American who was hired as a professor in the College of Education when Florida International University started more than 30 years ago, Carlos Alvarez, worked together with his wife, an FIU counselor, for the intelligence services of Cuba.
Alvarez took FIU students to Cuba frequently and worked with other Cuban-American professors to bring professors from Cuba to the United States. Alvarez and his wife were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to several years in prison for spying in the United States. Alvarez was very pleasant and friendly with all professors and administrators at FIU. He pretended to be a friend of this writer knowing that he invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and was a strong anti-communist. Many Marxist and socialist Cuban-American professors have been hired in universities throughout the United States.
Montaner explained that “Thousands of people directly or indirectly linked to the political life and communications of most of the world’s nations, most especially to those of the major countries in the West, which end up responding to the dictates from Havana.” In addition, Cuba has a very effective counterintelligence agency or secret police called Seguridad del Estado whose spies were trained by the East German Stasi, a highly effective secret police. This Cuban secret police agency employs about 60,000 persons which amount to 0.5% of the population. Seguridad del Estado has infiltrated most of the opponent organizations and dissident groups inside the island and many anti-communist Cuban organizations in the United States. It has also penetrated Masons, all Christian churches, and other groups like the LGTB, and the “self-employed entrepreneurs” in Cuba.
This writer has explained that Pope Francis, who is a Marxist, worked with Obama to assist the United States in normalizing diplomatic relations with the Cuban regime. Cuba’s only cardinal, Jaime Ortega Alamino, shamefully collaborates with the tyrant Castro brothers.
Montaner concluded his article by stating the following: “Washington, which has lost the reflexes it had during the Cold War, does not know how to fight against that enemy. Or it can’t or won’t. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift describes how, after a shipwreck in Lilliput, Captain Lemuel Gulliver is tied down and captured by a legion of 6-inch-tall dwarfs. That’s what’s happening to the United States. It is not David against Goliath. It is Gulliver against 12,000 very efficient dwarfs.”
FBI report on how Cuba recruits spies in the United States
This writer is aware that the FBI published a report in 2014 explaining how Cuba has effectively recruited hundreds of graduates and professors from our best universities to work as spies in the United States. It is well known that the universities in the United States are filled with socialist, Marxist, and radical professors who have influenced many students to adopt the same bankrupt ideology.
President Barack Obama is a perfect example of a Harvard Law School graduate who is a Marxist and a hidden radical Muslim. Harvard and other Ivy League universities have employed many liberal, socialist, radical, and Marxist professors for decades.
Bill Gertz wrote an article titled “FBI: Cuban intelligence aggressively recruiting leftist American academics as spies, influence agents” which was published by the Washington Free Beacon website on September 5, 2014. Gertz explained that the Cuban regime’s intelligence services are aggressively recruiting radical leftist American academics and university professors as spies and influence agents, according to an internal FBI report published on September 2, 2014.
The five-page unclassified FBI report stated the following: “Cuban intelligence services have perfected the work of placing agents, that includes aggressively targeting U.S. universities under the assumption that a percentage of students will eventually move on to positions within the U.S. government that can provide access to information of use to the Cuban intelligence service. It notes that the Cubans devote a significant amount of resources to targeting and exploiting U.S. academia…Academia has been and remains a key target of foreign intelligence services.”
One of those individuals were Ana Belen Montes. Cuba’s intelligence services noted her radical ideas and recruited her in college.
Montes was born on February 28, 1957. Her parents were from Puerto Rico. In 1979 she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia, and in 1988 she earned a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Montes was hired by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from the Department of Justice in September 1985. Her first assignment was at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington where she worked as an intelligence research specialist. In 1992, Montes was selected for the DIA’s Exceptional Analyst Program and later traveled to Cuba to study the Cuban military.
Prior to her arrest, she lived in a two bedroom co-op in Cleveland Park, Washington, DC. Montes advanced rapidly through the ranks at DIA and became its most senior Cuban analyst. During all those years she provided disinformation on the Cuban regime and shared Pentagon classified information with the Cubans. Prosecutors would later say that Montes was already working for the Cubans when she joined the DIA in 1985.
In their charging documents, federal prosecutors stated: “Montes communicated with the Cuban Intelligence Service through encrypted messages and received her instructions through shortwave encrypted transmissions from Cuba. In addition, Montes communicated by coded numeric pager messages with the Cuban Intelligence Service by public telephones located in the District of Columbia and Maryland. The codes included ‘I received message’ or ‘danger.'” The prosecutors further stated that all of the information was on water-soluble paper that could be rapidly destroyed.
During the course of the investigation against her, it was determined that Montes had passed a considerable amount of classified information to the Cuban Intelligence Directorate, including the identities of four U.S. spies. In 2007, DIA counterintelligence official Scott W. Carmichael publicly alleged that it was Ana Montes who told Cuban intelligence officers about a clandestine U.S. Army camp in El Salvador. Carmichael said that Montes knew about the existence of the Special Forces camp because she visited it only a few weeks before the camp was attacked in 1987 by Cuban-supported guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.
On September 21, 2001, Ana Belen Montes was arrested and subsequently charged with conspiracy to commit espionage for the government of Cuba. Montes eventually pleaded guilty to spying and in October 2002, were sentenced to a 25-year prison term followed by five years’ probation. The Cuban oppressive and bloody regime is working with the Obama administration to have Montes released to Cuba as Obama did with the five Cuban spies. It would not surprise this writer if the traitor in the White House would free Montes before he leaves office.
The five Cuban spies were Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González.
The five Cuban intelligence officers were arrested in September 1998 and later convicted in Miami of conspiracy to commit espionage, conspiracy to commit murder, acting as agents of a foreign government, and other illegal activities in the United States. The five spies were sent to the United States to observe and infiltrate Cuban American groups including Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National Foundation, and Brothers to the Rescue. They were part of La Red Avispa (the Wasp Network).
The U.S. government also accused the spies of lying about their identities and sending 2,000 pages of unclassified information obtained from U.S. military bases to Cuba. The court found that they had infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based organization that flew small aircraft over the Florida straits in efforts to rescue rafters fleeing Cuba. On February 24, 1996, two Brothers to the Rescue small planes were shot down by two Cuban Migs by a direct order from Fidel and Raúl Castro, a crime that was committed with impunity. One plane was able to escape and fly back to Miami.
The small planes were flying in international airspace and four U.S. citizens of Cuban origin were murdered. Gerardo Hernández was sentenced two life sentences for his involvement in this horrible crime. Obama did not care about the suffering of the relatives of these four pilots and released the five spies as requested by the Cuban dictator Raúl Castro.
The FBI report pointed out that one recruitment method used by the Cubans is to appeal to American leftists’ ideology. It gave as an example the following: “For instance, someone who is allied with communist or leftist ideology may assist the [Cuban intelligence service] because of his/her personal beliefs. Others are offered lucrative business deals in Cuba in a future post-U.S. embargo environment, and are treated to extravagant, all-expense paid visits to the island.” This writer was invited to Cuba while he taught at FIU to an all-expense paid visit to the island by another Cuban American FIU professor that did not know that he was an anti-communist who has denounced the Cuban tyranny his entire life in radio and television and in articles and books.
Conclusion
Bill Gertz needs to be commended for his two articles in the Washington Free Beacon, one revealing the failure of the CIA to protect our nation by hiring almost 100 double agents from Cuba, East Germany, and Russia. The other article exposed how Cuban regime’s intelligence services are aggressively recruiting radical leftist American academics and university professors as spies and influence agents.
Monroe-Hamilton and this writer do not trust the Russians or the Cubans and certainly cannot trust those who form alliances with them such as Barack Obama. Obviously, to survive as a nation, we must have spies in our enemy countries since we must have verifiable and trustworthy intelligence. Otherwise, our enemies will take advantage of our beloved country.
The Castro brothers have been engaged in subversion, espionage, military interventions, and support for terror groups thought out the world for 57 years. It is inexplicable to this writer why the United States has tolerated communist Cuba’s long record of attacks on the United States and around the planet that have caused the death of tens of thousands of people and brought so much misery.
The United States should have overthrown the communist regime in Cuba long time ago. Cuba is helping, as it has done for 57 years, the enemies of America and terrorist organizations. Obama’s New Cuban policy is an absolute failure since it is providing financial assistance to the worst and longest dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere!
