Cuban agents in the White House?

Did you know that the White House has been infiltrated by Cuban intelligence?

That’s the assessment of Christopher Simmons, a Defense Intelligence Agency counterintelligence officer who appeared at the Heritage Foundation last week.

Simmons said that confessed spy Ana Montes, the former top DIA Cuba analyst, was not an anomaly. “Ana Montes was not the only senior U.S. official working for the Cubans,” he told the Heritage audience. “Based on my estimate there are at least six others like her. There may be, the number may actually be in the teens, of long-term penetrations at the highest level of the U.S. government. And we’re not talking a slipshod operation. We’re talking the FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, Congress, and the White House.”

If you don’t believe me, I don’t blame you. You can watch it here, it begins around 1:17. (And no, he did not include the State Department in that list.)

The entire program, which examines the Cuban threat to U.S. national security, is about an hour and forty minutes long. I found one news account only, from the Washington Times.

Simmons is joined in the Heritage program by State Department official Robert Blau, who describes the “reconfigured” threat that Cuba poses today, after the post-Soviet drop in its conventional force strength. He cites a number of items in the State Department’s report on state sponsors of terrorism, and makes the allegation – a new one, not contained in the terrorism report – that “whatever they collect” in terms of intelligence information, “they will share with our enemies, with Iran, with terrorist groups.” He says that another element of the Cuban threat to U.S. national security is Cuba’s press and propaganda activity around the world, “constantly interpreting the news, putting their spin on it so that the anti-American view is what’s out there all the time.” Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart is also on the program; he discusses the Cuban threat through the decades, and in response to a question, he gives a remarkable description of U.S. policy toward Cuban American travel, and of his own constituents who choose to travel to Cuba.

But Simmons is the most interesting, an extreme exception among counterintelligence officers, who tend to avoid public discussions. In addition to the Heritage appearance and another on Miami Spanish-language television, Simmons has been writing in the Miami Herald, and when he was introduced at Heritage, his host said he is writing a regular column for that paper, every three weeks.

Simmons says that Cuba sells intelligence to other countries for profit, and he generally paints a picture of a skilled, effective, and highly active intelligence service that focuses on the United States, its opponents at home, and its opponents in Miami. He discloses that the Cuban Interests Section in Washington has a signals intelligence facility that carries out electronic eavesdropping in the Washington area.

His latest column appeared in yesterday’s Herald, and focused on Iran.

In that column, he mentioned a controversy from the summer of 2003, where it was alleged that private Los Angeles-based satellite broadcasts to Iran were being jammed, and that the jammer was located in Cuba. Simmons states that “Cuban intelligence” performed the jamming, “acting on behalf of Tehran.”

This is a new interpretation. When the allegations arose in 2003, the State Department called in Cuban diplomats, asked for an explanation, and eventually received one.

“Cuba informed us on August 3 that they had located the source of the interference and had taken action to stop it,” according to a State Department spokeswoman in an August 26, 2003 story by Agence France-Presse. “The government of Cuba informed us that the interference was coming from an Iranian diplomatic facility,” she added.

Two months later, the Deputy Secretary of State testified about the jamming, to the same effect:

SEN. BILL NELSON: You were talking to Senator Brownback about the jamming. There was a report that the Cuban government was jamming broadcasts into Iran at a time that -- when students were protesting the oppression by the ruling clerics. What do you know about that?

MR. ARMITAGE: We approached the government of Cuba about some jamming that was emanating from Cuba. It was not the government of Cuba, it was another entity, and it has ceased.

There’s a lot to comment upon here; I hope readers do, and I certainly will in the future.

"Cuban spies are lurking"

Scott Carmichael, the self-deprecating Defense Intelligence Agency official who investigated Cuban spy Ana Montes, wrote in his book that he looks like Chris Farley of Saturday Night Live.

Actually, the more he continues his book tour, the more he resembles not an actor, but a prop in a show – I would say a right-wing show, but that would give conservatism and political philosophy in general a bad name.

Carmichael, fresh from appearances in Miami, spoke at the American Enterprise Institute last week.

I’m sorry I missed him, but his appearance was covered by Newsmax.com, which is sort of a wire service with attitude.

Newsmax called him DIA’s “top counter-spy,” which is a considerable promotion – Carmichael is a veteran investigator, not the director of the agency. Carmichael said, “I believe” that other Cuban spies are operating in the U.S. government, which Newsmax translated as “more Cuban spies are lurking inside the U.S. government.” You get the idea.

According to Newsmax, Carmichael said that Montes, DIA’s top Cuba analyst, was “on a first name basis” with Fulton Armstrong, the intelligence community’s top Latin America analyst. (Amazing, isn’t it?) They “continued to confide by phone even as Carmichael and his investigative team were closing the noose around Ana Montes,” Newsmax says.

Joe McCarthy, call your office.

This is a clumsy innuendo that looks ridiculous to readers of Carmichael’s book. Nothing was more important to Carmichael, he wrote in detail, than to create a “bubble” around the investigation so that neither she nor her colleagues would know an investigation was under way. As a result, her colleagues at DIA and other agencies continued to “confide” in Montes until the moment of her arrest in an atmosphere of complete normalcy.

Also appearing was Paul Crespo, a Miami media personality. He said that the U.S. government contains a “huge infrastructure of Castro sympathizers…Castro agents of influence have infiltrated the U.S. Army War College, the Navy War College,” not to mention Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In Miami, they have “penetrated the Miami Herald” and other media, Crespo added.

Brave statements, no names provided.

Norman Bailey, who was dismissed after serving three months as the intelligence community’s Cuba-Venezuela “mission manager,” also appeared. He wondered, according to Newsmax, why none of Montes’ analytical work has been disavowed by the government.

Maybe, in the case of bioweapons allegations, it’s because the intelligence community – post-Ana Montes – re-examined its files on weapons of mass destruction programs worldwide and downgraded its assessment of Cuba’s activities.

Newsmax breaks new ground in reporting that Bailey:

“…was summarily fired without explanation in March 2007 by the incoming Director of National Intelligence, Gen. Mike McConnell, after asking too many questions about Cuba and the continued use of the National Intelligence Estimates that Ana Montes had authored before her arrest. ‘FBI counter-intelligence is entirely convinced there are several other high-level Cuban agents, not just in the intelligence community, but in the policy community,’ Bailey said.”

Newsmax also reports:

“Montes also played a decisive role in suppressing intelligence obtained from Cuban sources in 1994 that led other analysts to conclude that Castro was developing biological weapons. ‘Ana objected so strongly to the draft that she actually spiked it. That's the kind of power she had,’ Carmichael said.”

That assertion is not in Carmichael’s book, and it can only be drawn from the intelligence community’s assessment of the damage Montes caused during her long spy career.

As Carmichael continues to promote his book, maybe it’s time for the the U.S. government to declassify as much of this assessment as possible, so everyone in this debate can separate fact from his commercial efforts and the political theater in which he is playing.

Carmichael vs. Carmichael

I have written elsewhere about True Believer, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) investigator Scott Carmichael’s account of the probe of Cuban spy Ana Montes.

There’s a gap emerging between the book itself and Carmichael’s statements on his south Florida book tour.

The book tour is turning out to be a lot more juicy than the book.

Half the reason I bought the book was to learn about how Montes came to be a spy. Carmichael treated that subject in a single sentence, explaining that she was recruited while working as a Freedom of Information officer at the Department of Justice and attending graduate school at night. That’s it.

Now, I hear that Carmichael is saying that Cuban agents guided her career, coaching her from the Department of Justice to her job at DIA. That did not make it into the book.

Another reason to buy the book was to learn about the damage she surely caused to U.S. security, but an affidavit (pdf here) that the FBI submitted in court tells more than Carmichael’s entire book. Carmichael lists cases where Montes could have betrayed military plans and intelligence: the 1990 U.S. intervention in Panama, the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, a 1987 attack that killed an American soldier in El Salvador, the liberation of Kuwait. But in each case Carmichael writes that he does not know if she did so.

Now Carmichael is turning against his colleagues. He tells the Miami Herald that Cuban intelligence “has the American government thoroughly penetrated,” another claim that didn’t make it into the book. Yet his fellow counterintelligence officers are indifferent, he says, seeing Montes as “an isolated case.” Apparently he hopes that his book and tour will help him win his own argument inside the U.S. government.

Carmichael-on-tour also told the Herald that Montes “participated in every significant policy decision on Cuba for nine years.” Presumably, that means 1992-2001, which is a neat way for Carmichael to smear the Clinton Administration. But Montes, as an intelligence analyst, would have had to elbow her way to the policy table, and if she was a player in policy decisions, one has to wonder why that fact didn’t make it into Carmichael’s book.

Are we to believe that she was part of the secret negotiations of the Clinton-era migration accords – negotiations that were kept secret even from the State Department’s Office of Cuban Affairs? Did she advise President Clinton to sign Helms-Burton in 1996?

Carmichael’s book is a good account of his own investigation. Admirably, he is donating his share of book proceeds to the family of the American soldier killed in combat in El Salvador.

Miami is the natural place for him to promote his book. But the more time he spends there, the more Carmichael veers toward politics, using his authority as a U.S. government official to add speculation and, in the case of Montes’ involvement in policy decisions, misinformation to the concrete but limited information in his book.

The narrow focus of True Believer was reason enough to hope for another book – or a declassification of the intelligence community’s study of this case – to tell the full Ana Montes story. Now Carmichael’s book tour adds another, and it grows day by day.

Cuban spy Ana Montes

Here’s a review of the book on the Ana Montes spy case by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s counterintelligence officer who led that agency’s investigation.

In brief, it’s an interesting read, but if you are looking for new information on the burning questions in this case – how Montes was recruited and what damage she did in her 16-year espionage career – you will not find it in this book.