How Cuban spies infiltrating the United States government remain a real and present danger to America, and the role they played in helping flood the U.S. with cocaine.

 

CBS's 60 Minutes tonight on their 56th season finale will air a segment titled "Cuban Spycraft": 

"For decades, prolific Cuban spies working in the U.S. government, serving in high-profile positions with top security clearances, have evaded American intelligence officials. This Sunday, Cecilia Vega reports on two undercover agents." 

Peter J. Lapp retired as an FBI special agent after 22 years of investigating or leading counterintelligence investigations involving Cuba, Russia, and China. He is the author of Queen of Cuba: An FBI Agent's Insider Account of the Spy Who Evaded Detection for 17 Years and an excerpt of his interview with 60 Minutes is available on YouTube.

 

Cecilia Vega: The story of two American citizens with top security clearances, and how they spied on behalf of Cuba which bartered and sold America's secrets to enemies around the world. 

Cecilia Vega: Do you think there are other Ana Montes's in the government right now?

Peter Lapp: Oh, absolutely, absolutely

Cecilia Vega: That's chilling

Peter Lapp: There is no doubt that the Cubans are penetrating our government with individuals who are loyal to them, and not to us.

On May 13, 2024 the Miami Herald published my OpEd titled, "History of Cuban spying and the harm done to the U.S." This is an expanded version of that piece. Available exclusively here:

Partial history of Cuban spying and the harm done to the U.S. 

by John Suarez 

Ambassador Victor Manuel Rocha spent over 40 years spying for communist Cuba at the State Department, holding important postings in Latin America, and in the National Security Council. Later, he worked as a private consultant for the US Southern Command, which oversees Cuba. 

The government prosecutor from the Biden Administration's Department of Justice in the plea deal with Rocha attempted to strip other potential victims of the right to seek restitution arguing that the only victim was the U.S. government.  This argument did not hold up under scrutiny, and Judge Beth Bloom called it out, and had both parties remove it from their agreement. 

The Associated Press reported on April 12, 2024 that "Federal authorities have been conducting a confidential damage assessment that could take years to complete," and when discovered, much of the harm done by Ambassador Rocha will remain classified. Rocha was sentenced on April 12th to 15 years in federal prison and fined $500,000.

Others have stolen U.S. intelligence that got Americans killed, and engaged in influence operations to downplay Havana’s threat to the United States. 

Spying for Havana were Ana Belen Montes, who spent 17 years at the Pentagon in the Defense Intelligence Agency; Walter Kendall Myers, a high ranking analyst at the State Department who spent 30 years spying with his wife Gwendolyn; and Marta Rita Velazquez, a legal officer at the Agency for International Development, who recruited Ana Belen Montes. Philip Agee who worked at the Central Intelligence Agency defected to Cuba in 1973 and outed 250 CIA officers and agents. 

 In addition Castro’s spies, who pass themselves off as diplomats, operate in Havana’s embassy in Washington, and at Cuba’s UN Mission in New York City. 

They also operate on our college campuses, and the FBI declassified a report in 2014 warning about this practice. Mary O’Grady of The Wall Street Journal made the case in her May 12, 2024 column that the Cuban intelligence services are behind the nationwide pro-Hamas protests.

Carlos Alvarez, a psychology professor at Florida International University spent nearly 30 years spying on his community, and organizing trips for students to Cuba. His wife Elsa pleaded guilty to concealing her husband’s actions.

Soviet intelligence files made public in Vasili Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew's 2005 book, The World Was Going Our Way show that U.S. travelers to Cuba helped KGB agents obtain identity documents and that Fidel and Raul Castro worked with the spy agency five years before taking power in 1959.

 The Cuban dictatorship also sends illegal agents to spy and conduct active measures in America. Havana’s WASP spy network infiltrated the United States to gather information on military installations and personnel, sow division among Cuban exiles, locate places to store weapons and explosives, and terrorize then assassinate a CIA agent living in Florida with a mail bomb. They helped kill four in the February 24, 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown, and the network’s head Gerardo Hernandez was convicted of murder conspiracy. 

 These practices began in 1959. In 1961, the Soviet Defense Council gave Czechoslovakia orders to use Cuban intelligence to infiltrate existing drug operations in the United States and Latin America and to lay the groundwork for “recruiting” these independent activities. The former high-ranking Czech official Jan Sejna gave a detailed account of his meetings with Raul Castro, which he had on average four times a year between 1961 and 1968, the year Sejna defected to the U.S..

After the State Department determined in January 1982 that Havana had armed the M-19 terrorist group in exchange for drugs smuggling to the U.S., Cuba was added to the state terror sponsors list on March 1, 1982

Four high-ranking Cuban officials were indicted by a US grand jury for narcotics smuggling on November 5, 1982.

• Rene Rodriguez-Cruz, Cuban Communist Party Central Committee member and president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship With The Peoples. 

• Aldo Santamaria-Cuadrado, a vice admiral in the Cuban navy and Cuban Communist Party Central Committee member.

• Fernando Ravelo-Renedo, Cuban ambassador to Colombia.. 

• Gonzalo Bassols-Suarez, former minister-counsel of the Cuban embassy in Bogota and Cuban Communist Party member.

Ana Belen Montes was recruited by Cuban intelligence agents in New York City in December 1984, and on September 30, 1985 she reported to work at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the Pentagon. 

 Former Army counterintelligence special agent Reg Brown also came to the DIA in 1985. Chris Simmons,a career Counterintelligence Officer, in his 2023 book, Castro’s Nemesis describes how Brown conducted an assessment that revealed the “Castro regime still trafficked drugs” and that this involved the “organized and sustained involvement by many of Fidel’s highest ranking officials.” The assessment was sent to other DIA analysts for a “routine review” in early June 1989. Brown was shocked  when CNN reported “Cuba’s arrest of 14 officials for drug trafficking” on June 27th. 

Simmons wrote, “Reg was suspicious at the coincidence. The timing of the internal release of his assessment and Havana’s crackdown were eerily close. Additionally, most Cuban officials named in his assessment were among the thirty-three executed, imprisoned, fired, or who committed suicide.”

A Cuban spy in the DIA warned Havana that their role in flooding the U.S. with cocaine would be discovered.

 This was not the end of the Havana Cartel. With the rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 1999, Havana played a major role in the formation of the Soles Cartel, and the dramatic increase in cocaine entering the U.S. over the next 25 years.

 3,186 Americans died of cocaine overdoses in 1999. After over 20 years of cooperation between Cuba and the United States combating drug trafficking 23,513 Americans died from cocaine in 2021.

Rocha and other Cuban spies like him harm the U.S. government and tens of thousands of Americans.

Below is the 2023 short documentary Havana Cartel that explores the Castro regime's extensive involvement in drug trafficking with the objective of causing harm to Americans, and profiting from it to advance communist revolutionary objectives. 

Operation Odessa: Documentary exposes relationship between Cuban spy and the Cali drug cartel

So crazy, it must be true

Cuban intelligence officer linked to Cali drug cartel featured in Showtime documentary

The Castro regime continues to deny its role in the international drug trade with strong denials by high level officials. Be that as it may inconvenient facts continue to arise that demonstrate otherwise. Right now on Netflix there is a Showtime documentary, Operation Odessa, that features a Cuban intelligence officer as a high level operator with the Cali Cartel, and is well reviewed with a 90% audience approval on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Miami residents, who were living in South Florida in the 1990s, would remember this scandal that involved the purchase of a Russian submarine to smuggle drugs and contraband into the United States, and its linkage to Porky's, a strip club in Hialeah, and was an important story reported in The New York Times in 1997.

Nelson Pablo Yester-Garrido in Africa with his Russian fighter jet

The Daily Mail in a March 13, 2018 article revealed how filmmaker Tiller Russell was able to reach Nelson Pablo Yester-Garrido  a.k.a "Tony" to be interviewed in the documentary. He had been putting out messages that he wanted to meet him to get the full story, the other protagonists in the conspiracy told him that "Tony" would never talk, then Russell got a message:

"'In Moscow, I got a text from Tony that said, “You’ve talked to the waiters; you should come meet the chef. Meet me in Africa for a cup of coffee … tomorrow.”’ Russell did as he was told and flew to the appointed city in Africa; as soon as he walked into his hotel room, the phone rang and he was instructed to be downstairs in five minutes, where Tony whisked him off in a Porsche Cayenne and they spent several ‘surreal’ days together; Tony showed the director his Russian fighter jet, which had $5 million in the cockpit as the fugitive’s getaway plan, and told his part of the story."

The full story is told in the documentary by the three criminal protagonists and the investigators who pursued them and tracked their crimes.

Pablo Tony Yester, the Cuban spy and drug lord who was wanted by the FBI for trying to buy a Russian submarine for a drug cartel and then hid in SA for a decade - he’s given a tell all interview in this incredible documentary. Must watch on @NetflixSA #OperationOdessa pic.twitter.com/2yF4Wkun0z

— Mandy Wiener (@MandyWiener) August 28, 2018

Along the way, it is revealed in the documentary that Nelson Pablo Yester-Garrido  a.k.a "Tony" would mock investigators sending messages from Cuba inviting them to come and get him. 

Turns out that Tony had been "hiding out" in South Africa with his Italian girl friend for 14 years, and was arrested in December 2017 when visiting Rome, Italy and extradited to the United States in July 2019 where he faces a life sentence for his many exploits in the world of international narcotics trafficking.

Wall Street Journal reports that "Venezuela's Hugo Chávez worked to flood U.S. with Cocaine"

Where do you think he got the idea to do that from?

Hugo Chavez was mentored by Fidel Castro

Juan Forero and José de Córdoba in The Wall Street Journal have written an important expose on the role played by Hugo Chávez in flooding the United States witch cocaine. The report is based on documents provided by federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York. According to The Wall Street Journal report:

In 2005, Chávez convened a small group of his top officials to discuss plans to ship cocaine to the U.S. with help from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, said a participant in the meeting who, at the time, was a justice on Venezuela’s supreme court, according to the papers. The Bush administration was strongly criticizing his governing style then and had publicly approved of a 2002 coup that failed to oust him.
“During the meeting, Chávez urged the group, in substance and in part, to promote his policy objectives, including to combat the United States by ‘flooding’ the country with cocaine,” said an affidavit in the documents written by a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent. The former supreme court justice was identified as Eladio Aponte, who fled to the U.S. in 2012 and has been a witness on drug cases, said a person familiar with his role in the investigations.

Nicolas Maduro has continued this practice, and family members have been caught smuggling cocaine. Reuters reported on December 14, 2017 "[t]wo nephews of Venezuela’s first lady were sentenced to 18 years in prison following their convictions in New York on U.S. drug trafficking charges."

There are those who are questioning what is the motive for the Chavista regime in Venezuela to flood the United States with cocaine. The answer requires a broader and strategic look through the perspective of the Chavista regime in Venezuela and the Castro regime in Cuba. 

The Wall Street Journal argues that Bush Administration criticism of the Chavez regime and public approval of a failed 2002 coup were the reasons for the cocaine smuggling, but relations between the two countries remained normal, and U.S. diplomats had warned the Chavez regime of the threat. Furthermore this policy continued during the Obama Administration.

One needs to go further back and look at a key Chavez ally.

On March 1, 1982 the Cuban dictatorship was placed on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. This was less than three months after the US State Department confirmed that the Castro regime was using a narcotics ring to funnel both arms and cash to the Colombian M19 terrorist group then battling to overthrow Colombia’s democratic government. 

Drug traffickers: Raul Castro with Aldo Santamaria-Cuadrado

According to the UPI in 1982 the following high ranking Cuban officials were indicted by the United States for operating a drug ring out of Cuba: Aldo Santamaria-Cuadrado, head of the navy and a member of the Communist Central Committee; Fernando Ravelo-Renedo, ambassador to Colombia; Gonzalo Bassols-Suarez, a former staff member at the Cuban embassy in Colombia; and Rene Rodriguez-Cruz, a Central Committee member and president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the People. 

According to  the July 18, 1989 Heritage Foundation report, Castro's Show Trials Do Not Mean an End to Cuba's Drug Trade, the links to building narcotics networks to the United States stretch back to the earliest days of the dictatorship.

"Documented evidence of Cuba's role in drug trafficking dates back to the early 1960s. According to a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) intelligence report released in 1982, a meeting was held in Havana in 1961 between communist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Moises Crespo of the Cuban Secret Police, and future Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende, to.discuss creating a narcotics network to smuggle illegal drugs to the U.S."

This was at a time when Soviet aid to Cuba made the U.S. Embargo irrelevant to the Castro regime, and the purpose of sanctions was to increase the cost to the Soviet Union to operate in Latin America.

Despite receiving massive and increasing Soviet subsidies between 1960 and 1987 the Castro regime engaged in massive arms smuggling and drug trafficking in the service of ideological objectives and as can be seen in Venezuela today in establishing a Cuban imperial presence in the hemisphere, and striking at the soft underbelly of the United States.
In a 1991 Frontline documentary, Cuba and Cocaine, U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Commander Jeff Karonis, stated, "We would observe in the middle of the day an air drop going on inside Cuban waters. The scenario would be for a small twin-engine airplane with maybe 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of cocaine to fly over Cuba, drop the drugs to a predesignated rendezvous point to several boats. Then it would exit back down off Cuba, and many times a Cuban military vessel would be in the immediate vicinity, right on scene with them.'' 

The results of this decades long effort can be seen in reports on drug abuse in the U.S. military and the wider American populace. Members of elite units with drug addictions committing suicide. Flooding the United States with drugs is an effective way to reduce military readiness.

When the FBI broke up the Wasp Network in 1998 it discovered, among other things, that they were "compiling the names, home addresses, and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers and that of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica Naval Station in Key West." It is a safe bet to make that there are other networks of Cuban spies monitoring U.S. military facilities and personnel, and their readiness.

The links between the Castro regime and narcotics trafficking stretch back decades and across the Americas.

Manuel Noriega and Fidel Castro embrace

During Panamanian strong man General Manuel Noriega's 1992 trial information emerged publicly implicating the Castro regime in drug trafficking that Sun Sentinel reported at the time:

"Federal prosecutors say Noriega traveled to Havana to ask [Fidel] Castro to mediate a potentially deadly dispute with top members of Colombia`s Medellin cocaine cartel. They say the cartel chiefs were upset because a major drug lab had been seized in Panama despite payment of millions of dollars in protection money to Noriega. According to the Noriega indictment, Castro negotiated a peace accord between the cartel and Noriega at the 1984 meeting. The allegation forms a cornerstone of the racketeering and drug trafficking charges against Noriega."

At the same time convicted cartel leader Carlos Lehder implicated Raul Castro and U.S. fugitive Robert Vesco "to route cocaine flights through Cuba." Capitol Hill Cubans blogged how two years later, a federal indictment listed General Raul Castro as part of a conspiracy that smuggled seven and a half tons of cocaine into the United States over a 10-year period.
This would not be the first time that drug trafficking was carried out to advance political objectives.

In the mid-19th century the British Government imposed the trade of opium upon China, generating huge numbers of addicts, weakened and compromised China’s territorial sovereignty and economic power for almost a century. This was done in order to redress the trade imbalance between the two countries that favored China.  Great Britain  in the 19th century had a population of 10 million and China had a population of 300 million. These population numbers are approximate to the population of 11 million in Cuba today and 327 million in the United States today.

The Castro regime sees itself as a revolutionary world power that has projected itself into conflicts in Asia, Africa, and the Americas over the past sixty years with successes in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, and Venezuela.

The Cuban dictatorship has also viewed the United States since 1959 as an existential enemy and has sought out creative means to effectively attack and destroy the fighting capacity of the United States.
 
This is what the Castro regime has sought to do to the United States since at least 1961, and is using its client state of Venezuela to carry on its agenda of undermining the United States. 

It is not surprising that Hugo Chavez, who was mentored and guided by Fidel Castro, would collaborate with Cubans in advancing this long term objective of flooding the United States with deadly drugs. It is also not surprising that the Castro regime would deny all of this and gas light the American public. It has done the same thing with the case of U.S. diplomats who have suffered brain injuries at the Embassy in Havana. What is surprising is that this is not understood by either the mainstream media or many policy makers in the United States who seek to downplay it.

Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post reported on Venezuela, the FARC, Cuba trafficking axis on May 24, 2015 in the article "A drug cartel’s power in Venezuela":

Ever since Colombian commandos captured the laptop of a leader of the FARC organization eight years ago, it’s been known that Chávez gave the Colombian narcoguerrillas sanctuary and allowed them to traffic cocaine from Venezuela to the United States with the help of the Venezuelan army. But not until a former Chávez bodyguard [ Leamsy Salazar] defected to the United States in January [2015] did the scale of what is called the “Cartel of the Suns ” start to become publicly known. [...] The day after Salazar’s arrival in Washington, Spain’s ABC newspaper published a detailed account of the emerging case against Cabello, and last month, ABC reporter Emili Blasco followed up with a book laying out the allegations of Salazar and other defectors, who say Cuba’s communist regime and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah have been cut in on the trafficking."

Consider the following: the Castro regime provides safe haven for the FARC in Cuba because it has appeared in Wikileaks. The close relationship between the regimes in Havana and Caracas has been long and well documented. Tens of thousands of Cuban advisers have been operating in Venezuela for years. Drugs are flooding into the United States at unprecedented levels fueling overdoses and an epidemic endangering American lives.

Shouldn't their role and the shared strategic objectives of the Castro and Chavez regimes be reported on?

Castro regime denies involvement in drug trafficking: Historical record places in doubt their claim of innocence.

Time to stop giving the benefit of the doubt.

Part of cocaine shipment seized in Panama

The Cuban government is denying that it was involved in the smuggling of tons of cocaine on a ship bound for Turkey with a stop in Holland. The Panamanian government is also giving the dictatorship in Havana the benefit of the doubt on the cocaine shipment. The only problem is that the Castro regime lies consistently. The government of Panama is making a mistake.

#CUBA: Govt issues statement denying involvement in #cocaine bust in #Panama. That govt initially said cargo came from #Cuba. Statement says drugs were likely added after cargo left Cuba, something #Panamanian govt said yesterday as well. https://t.co/Y7SqO2PBjl @wplglocal10 pic.twitter.com/ZvAiawJISy

— Hatzel Vela (@HatzelVelaWPLG) May 22, 2019

Consider the following:

U.S. and Canadian diplomats suffering from unexplained brain injuries.

 At least 24 U.S. diplomats and 14 Canadian diplomats have suffered unexplained brain injuries in Havana, Cuba. Symptoms included "nausea, headaches, nosebleeds, hearing and eye problems." Official Cuban government response: The diplomats are victims of mass stress and the sounds that they are hearing are crickets. The Cuban embassy in Washington DC on September 19, 2017 claimed that “Cuba strictly observes its obligations to protect foreign diplomats on its soil” is not true. This is another lie. There is a decades-old pattern of hostility. In 2006, the Miami Herald reported how a high-ranking member of the U.S. mission found his mouthwash replaced with urine. In another case, after one diplomat’s family privately discussed their daughter’s susceptibility to mosquito bites, “They returned home to find all of their windows open and the house full of mosquitoes.” American diplomats, like their Canadian counterparts, have also had pets poisoned while stationed in Cuba. The types of injuries suffered by diplomats since November 2016 are new, but Cuba’s outlaw behavior toward them is not.

Raul Castro on March 21, 2016 in the joint press conference with President Obama said that there were no political prisoners in Cuba, and if any were identified they would be released immediately. A list of current Cuban political prisoners was provided, but they were not freed.

Weapons and fighter jets hidden under sacks of sugar.

In July 2013, Cuban officials were caught trying to smuggle tons of arms that included: warplanes, missiles, and technology related to ballistic missile programs hidden under 220,000 bags of sugar to North Korea and lied about it. This was also in violation of U.N. sanctions.

The Castro regime has sought to smuggle narcotics into the United States since 1961, and has been implicated time and time again. Indictments have been issued and documentaries have caught the illicit activities of the dictatorship on film.

Raul Castro with Aldo Santamaria-Cuadrado

According to the UPI in 1982 the following high ranking Cuban officials were indicted by the United States for operatiing a drug ring out of Cuba: Aldo Santamaria-Cuadrado, head of the navy and a member of the Communist Central Committee; Fernando Ravelo-Renedo, ambassador to Colombia; Gonzalo Bassols-Suarez, a former staff member at the Cuban embassy in Colombia; and Rene Rodriguez-Cruz, a Central Committee member and president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the People.

If one still has any doubts then take a look at the role the Castro regime has played in Venezuela with regards to narcotics trafficking.