Spy hysteria redux
By Amaury Cruz
Once more, the corporate media is giving voice to anti-Cuban-spy hysteria, as pro-embargo forces take to their battle stations and try to shoot down the plane of normal U.S.-Cuba relations before it takes off and escapes for good. In the absence of something more substantive, why not resurrect old fears about spies in our midst to sabotage any attempts at rapprochement?
For example, according to a Miami Herald article published June 14th and e-mailed by the University of Miami’s Cuba Transition Project, the “U.S. now has zero tolerance for Cuban spies.” Thus titled, the article artfully raises not only the specter of spies running amok, but also a supposed new “tough” attitude by the U.S. government. It’s not clear, however, how the U.S. was ever tolerant of Cuban spies and the article actually explains that U.S. counterintelligence has preferred to watch Cuba’s spies and expel them only when they got “too frisky.” Only four Cuban spies were arrested in the U.S. between 1959 and 1995, according to the author, Juan Tamayo. How convenient that the Myers couple was arrested recently as normalization began to rise on the horizon.
According to Mr. Tamayo, Cuba’s five intelligence services were regarded as among the world’s best, after those of the U.S., the Soviet Union and Israel. In another recent Miami Herald story, Carlos Alberto Montaner picks up the same theme, relying extensively on statements of one Chris Simmons, “a former lieutenant colonel in U.S. counterintelligence” also cited by Tamayo and a frequent contributor to the Herald who supposedly “dug up” Ana Belén Montes. According to Simmons, Cuba has one of the “finest espionage and counterespionage services,” and has spies just about everywhere in the U.S. government and the nation’s universities. Thus, “not a single important U.S. institution that has not been infiltrated, directly or indirectly, by the Cuban G-2.”
Citing Belen Montes and more recent cases such as the Myers’, Montaner sings the praises of Cuban intelligence and revels in cleverly speculative, non-disprovable statements such as: “What the Cubans did at the State Department and the Pentagon they have no doubt replicated or attempted to replicate at the CIA, the FBI, the Army, the Department of Justice or any other administrative, political or media organization where it is convenient to have a good ear capable of collecting sensitive information or lips capable of subtly defending the interests of the Castro brothers’ government.” So now we have to watch not only for those who may ferret out military secrets, but also those who may keep a file of Miami Herald stories or express an opinion that is suspect in the opinion of our Cubanologists.
Montaner even envisions a Manchurian candidate without the brainwashing in the original movie or the electronic controls in the sequel. In his narrative, “to facilitate the election of an American congressman and to keep him on Capitol Hill is not a very complicated task.” So now all congressmen who express a politically incorrect opinion are suspect in the eyes of our Guardian Council.
An unanswered question is why do most other spies demand, expect or receive money from their handlers, but not those who work for the Cubans? It doesn’t enter into Montaner’s analysis that, if a candidate is not controlled by anything but his or her convictions, he or she is not and cannot be a Manchurian candidate, but the people’s candidate.
No matter. After reading Montaner and having finished The Shadow Factory, a book by James Bamford, an award-winning national security reporter and producer of documentaries for the PBS Nova series, I’m concerned there are so many spies they will soon be able to turn any election anyway. Subtitled “the ultra-secret NSA from 9/11 to the eavesdropping on America,” Bamford’s book is a disturbing revelation of how the U.S government conducts both external and internal spying on a stupefying scale.
Start with the Cubans, who seem to be everywhere, according to Cubanologists and those in the business. Simmons says there are “approximately 250 agents and agent-handling officers in the U.S.,” including “six to nine senior agents within the U.S. government similar to Montes, more than a dozen in academia and 30-36 under diplomatic cover at Cuban missions in Washington and New York.” Then you have the CIA and its stations and agents all over the world. Dozens of other nations try to imitate the U.S. and infiltrate one another.
More damaging, the U.S. has joined Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand as the “Five Eyes” or nations that have built up the biggest electronic spying capacity in the world. Most other European or Asian countries with the resources to do it engage in extensive mutual espionage as well, both military and industrial. Israel is recognized as a leader in the area of electronic spying and has a history of very aggressive espionage in the U.S. with moles as well as other means. Somehow this hasn’t affected the U.S.-Israel alliance.
In addition, the NSA, CIA, FBI, DoD and an alphabet soup of U.S. agencies spend untold billions of dollars to spy not only on foreign countries, but on perfectly innocent American citizens who are going about their business without violating any law whatsoever. Tapping satellites, cell phone tower transmissions, and fiber optic cables at key locations in the world and using ultra-sophisticated supercomputers, they accumulate information about all of us at astounding rates — illegally and without warrants.
As documented in Bamford’s book, these agencies, led by the NSA, have developed the technological capacity to secretly and illegally scoop up all communications of any kind by almost all the people in the world, record, store, filter, and analyze them, create “circles of association,” and even come to certain conclusions. An army of researchers paid by the “intelligence-industrial complex” is currently working to perfect both automatic decision-making and speech analysis. They are part of Orwellian projects, with apt names such as Total Information Awareness, to snoop on the private calls, faxes and e-mails of teachers, journalists, activists, doctors, lawyers and other innocent people who have nothing to do with terrorism or any criminal activity.
Artificial intelligence machines similar to Hal in the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey, are being designed to “think” and make decisions about whom to focus on, based on analyses of the person’s behavior as captured by his or her digital footprints, and to proceed against an individual based on predicted, not actual behavior. Big Brother, in other words, has arrived much stronger than one would have thought, given that we were forewarned by George Orwell. As Bamford puts it, “there is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”
And not only America. It turns out Iran, for example, has demonstrated the ability to monitor cell phone calls and text messages, and has been able recently to suppress dissent, thanks to technology called “deep packet inspection” provided by Nokia Siemens Networks.
In sum, on top of all the spies among us, our communications, Google searches, Internet pages visited, medical records, purchasing habits, and perhaps auto pay transponder information are being constantly monitored. To top it all off, according to an article published June 24th in the alternet.org blog, the U.S. government is running a secretive intelligence recruitment program in schools, transforming the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP) “from a pilot project into a permanent budget item.” Plans were also announced to establish a “Reserve Officers’ Training Corps” to train unidentified future intelligence officers in U.S. college classrooms.
Who can trust anyone anymore? How do we know if a presumed journalist is not actually somebody’s agent planting misinformation or the student next to you an NSA or CIA informant? Perhaps that’s what the hysteria is all about — not trusting anyone. But least deserving of our trust, it appears, is our government.
Montaner and Simmons don’t say how they know of so many Cuban spies, but if they know how many there are, they should know who they are. If so, shouldn’t they report them to the authorities? Recall that an FIU academic went to jail for “misprision of a felony,” bottomed precisely on her not having ratted on her husband, who was accused of being an unregistered agent of the Cuban government.
Amaury Cruz is a Miami attorney.
