BOOKS
Spy one of many, says her nemesis
An intelligence mole hunter who wrote a book about Cuban spies will
speak tonight in Coral Gables.
BY GLENN GARVIN
ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com
Cuban spy Ana Montes, who passed U.S. military and intelligence secrets
back to Havana for 16 years from her senior post in the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA), was ''our worst nightmare,'' says the man who
caught her. But she wasn't alone.
''Fidel Castro has the American government thoroughly penetrated'' with
spies, says Scott W. Carmichael, the DIA mole hunter who first
identified Montes as a Cuban agent and nagged the FBI into launching the
investigation that finally brought her down in 2001.
''It was so easy for the Cubans to recruit Ana Montes and place her
where they wanted to, in the heart of U.S. intelligence,'' Carmichael
says. ``I have to believe that if they're that good, they've been able
to do it more than once.''
Carmichael is in Miami to read from his new account of the Montes case,
True Believer, at Books & Books tonight. He spent 2 ½ years wrangling
with the DIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies to get the book into
print, he says, because he's trying to sound an alarm about Castro's
spies -- an alarm the government isn't taking very seriously.
CLAIMS DISMISSED
''Frustration, that's why I wrote the book,'' Carmichael said during an
interview with The Miami Herald.
He has convened several meetings of U.S. military counterintelligence
experts since Montes' capture to call for a broad, coordinated hunt for
Cuban spies, he says, but his efforts have been greeted mostly with yawns.
''They continue to see it as an isolated case,'' Carmichael says, even
though authorities also broke up one Cuban spy ring in South Florida in
1998 and another in 2006. ``I believe strongly that they are wrong. My
belief is that there are many, many Ana Monteses, both down here in
Miami and up in Washington.''
Carmichael's claim that the U.S. government is riddled with Castro's
spies has been greeted skeptically by some intelligence officials and
Cuba policy analysts. ''How would he know?'' says Philip Peters, a
former U.S. diplomat who follows Cuban affairs for the conservative
Lexington Institute think-tank. ``His book is very thin on evidence.''
Others are more impressed. Roger Noriega, who held foreign policy
positions during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and both George
Bushes, says it troubled him that Montes held such a senior post on Cuba
despite her vocal opposition to U.S. policy there.
''There is an indifference to the threat that Cuba poses in our national
security apparatus,'' Noriega says. ``It extends to the intelligence
community. I don't think they're very rigorous or vigorous on the Cuba
account. It is disturbing, the picture he paints.''
The Defense Intelligence Agency collects, analyzes and manages all the
military intelligence flowing into the U.S. armed forces. Montes was the
DIA's senior military and political analyst on Cuba from 1992 until her
arrest in 2001 -- five years after Carmichael first questioned her. She
admitted spying for Cuba and is serving a 25-year term at a federal
prison in Texas.
Part of the plea deal under which Montes avoided a life sentence was for
her to make a full confession so intelligence officials could assess the
damage she did. Carmichael says the details were grim -- not only what
Montes passed back to Havana, but how blatantly she did it.
''She was meeting Cuban intelligence officers every two weeks in
restaurants around Washington, D.C., and giving them her reports over
lunch,'' says Carmichael. (Montes never removed classified documents
from her office; she memorized the information and typed it onto
computer disks that she gave to her Cuban spy masters.) ``The frequency
of those face-to-face meetings is astounding.''
So, apparently, were the contents of the disks. 'Most of it is still
classified, but it's pretty common knowledge now that the damage
assessment used the phrase `exceptionally grave,' '' says Carmichael.
``That's a very uncommon term to use in these things -- you only hear it
when they're talking about [the Soviet Union's prized mole in the FBI]
Robert Hanssen or someone at that level.
``She gave away all our sources and methods, all our judgments. She
participated in every significant policy decision on Cuba for nine years
and she told the Cubans all about every single one of them.''
SPREADING SECRETS
Worse yet, Carmichael says, is that if Fidel Castro knew all these
secrets, so did other regimes with which the United States is at odds.
''The danger is not that Cuba is going to land troops on Miami Beach,''
Carmichael says. ``The danger is that he's going to use the information
as currency to spend where it will help him the most. With Colombian
insurgents, for instance -- if it suits his purposes, he'll give them
the information, and if an American soldier gets killed, oh, too bad.
'In 2001, just a few months before Ana Montes was arrested, Castro
visited Syria, Libya and Iran. In Iran, he gave a speech and said, `Iran
and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its
knees.' Fidel Castro's greatest strength in that relationship is his
knowledge of us. That's his end of the deal.''
No comments:
Post a Comment