Based on the reporting by networks and press-agencies that have been bestowed Havana bureaus, an Obama-appointed diplomat can be forgiven for forgetting this; but Castro's is a Stalinist regime. Given our modern college textbooks, this diplomat can be forgiven for never knowing it; but such regimes are rigidly totalitarian. Based on modern public education this diplomat can be forgiven not knowing what totalitarian means; but it means total state control of every facet of a people's life.
“When it is a question of annihilating the enemy,” pronounced Stalin's chief prosecutor Andrey Vishinsky, “we can do it just as well without a trial.” Alan Gross was certainly triedâbut by some of Vishinsky's most devoted disciples.
Former political prisoner Armando Valladares, who somehow escaped the firing squad but spent 22 torture-filled years in Cuba's
gulag
, described his trial very succinctly: “not one witness to accuse me, not one to identify me, not one single piece of evidence against me.” Mr. Valladares was arrested in 1961 for the crime of refusing to display a pro-Castro sign on his desk. Shortly after his arrival on U.S. shores, Mr. Valladares was appointed by Ronald Reagan as U.S. ambassador to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, a setting where both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara traditionally basked in wild ovations. Modern history records few U.S. diplomatic tweaks as slick as those of Mr. Valladares, or U.S. ambassadors as effective as he.
On July 17, 2012, Armando Valladares published a letter to Alan Gross in
The Daily Caller
. Among its highlights:
Alan P. Gross
Havana, Cuba
Â
Dear friend:
Â
That is how I am compelled to address you, because even though we have never met, we share a common bond: I too lived behind the iron bars now surrounding you in Cubaâin my case for 22 years.
Â
Like you, I was convicted by the Cuban authorities without a single shred of evidence against me.
Â
I have no doubt that your greatest pain right now must be the realization that the U.S. government has turned its back on you. There was a time when the words “I am an American citizen” meant something. They meant all the more when the individual declaring that was the target of abuse outside of the United States. It gives me great sadness to say that inside the Communist boot that now tramples upon your dignity is the foot of the American president, Barack Obama.
The more Castro's thugs oppress you and make your family suffer, the more your jailers torture you, the harder things get for youâthe more this administration seeks to reward them with new concessions. Under any previous U.S. administration, Democrat or Republican, you would not still be in jail. The American president, who has made a habit of publicly bowing to foreign powers, bows to your torturers and would-be executioners. Meanwhile, the adult daughter of Cuba's dictator recently visited the U.S. to applaud and show her support for President Obama. She receives a visa to come to the United States and a Secret Service escort. And you? You suffer the torture of imprisonment.
Â
The Obama administration must step up its efforts to press for your release through its diplomatic channels. Should those diplomatic efforts fail, then they must be followed by real action, including the suspension of flights and remittances to Cuba until such time as you are allowed to return to the United States. If the Obama administration even threatened to do this it is my considered judgment that you would be on the next flight back to your home in Washington, D.C.
By the way, introducing cutting-edge communications equipment into Cuba didn't always land Americans a 15-year gig in a torture-chamber. In 1957 ATT presented Cuban “dictator” (according to every media mention) Fulgencio Batista with a golden telephone for his regime's enthusiastic welcome of all of the company's latest technology. This Cuban dictator reveled in the fact that Cubans had better, more abundant and cheaper means of communication than most Europeans. You might recall the scene from
Goldfather II
where Hyman Roth and Michael Corleone pass the golden telephone around Batista's conference table. This one scene contains an element of historical accuracy.
OPPOSING THE “EMBARGO” FOR FUN AND PROFIT
As explained earlier, to label our current relationship with Cuba an embargo is laughable. To label it a “blockade” shows appalling ignorance, functional illiteracy or, more likely, Castro-regime advocacy, on its payroll or off. And given the absence of any person or entity registered with U.S. Department of Justice as an agent of the Cuban government, we have to assume the latter.
Payments from Castro's payroll, however, can appear in laundered form. Take the case of the oft-quoted champion of unfettered U.S. trade and travel to Cuba, Phil Peters of the Lexington Institute. A Nexus-Lexus search shows that Mr. Peters could be properly billed as the mainstream media's go-to source on the Cuba embargo issue.
Here's a sampling of how his frequent media hosts introduce Cuba embargo opponent Phil Peters:
“Philip Peters follows economic matters in Cuba for the security- and-free-market-oriented Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.” (
The New York Times
)
“Philip Peters is a scholar at the Lexington Institute.” (
The Washington Post
)
Philip Peters is a Cuba expert with the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Va. (
The Wall Street Journal
)
“Philip Peters is Cuba specialist for the Lexington Institute, a Washington-area think tank that promotes free markets.” (
USA Today
)
“Philip Peters is a Cuba analyst at the Virginia-based Lexington Institute.” (The Associated Press)
“Philip Peters is a vice-president of the Lexington Institute and an expert on Cuban affairs.” (CNN)
Well, here's some background on the Lexington Institute's funding.
In a joint venture with the Castro regime, Canadian mining company Sherritt International operates the Moa nickel mining-plant
in Cuba's Oriente province. This facility was among the thousands stolen from their U.S. managers and stockholders at Cuban-Soviet gunpoint in 1960 (when it was worth $90 million). Now here's an explosive item from a legal memo uncovered by Babalu blog as part of a court case discovery:
“Canada's Sherritt works quietly in Washington ⦠recently it has given money to a former State Department employee, Phil Peters, to advance its interests. The money to Peters goes through contributions to the Lexington Institute, where Peters is a vice president. Because the Lexington Institute is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit, there is no public record of Sherritt's funding. This has allowed Peters to advise and direct the Cuba Working Group (a Congressional anti-embargo cabal) in ways beneficial to Sherritt while presenting himself to the Group as an objective think-tank scholar with a specialization in Cuba.”
21
In brief: one of the Castro regime's top business partners funnels under-the-table payments to America's top anti-embargo publicist, who is invariably billed as an “impartial, scholarly expert” in every media mention.
Nick Schwellenbach, a former investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, also uncovered incriminating items regarding the Lexington Institute's funding. Some of these were included in an investigative report by the
Mobile Press-Register
on Phil Peters's colleague Loren Thompson, the institute's “defense expert.” Thompson is consulted by the media on defense-spending matters almost as often as Peters is on Cuban matters.
“What is often not revealed in news reports, ”Schwellenbach discloses, “is that almost all funding for Thompson's employer, the non-profit Lexington Institute, comes from the same defense contractors who frequently have a stake in the programs that he writes about.” When confronted with the evidence, “Thompson readily confirmed that the institute receives âquite a significant' level of support from defense contractors, including similar amounts from Boeing and Los Angeles-based Northrop.... That
fact is not mentioned on the institute's Web site, however, and Thompson would not provide specific dollar amounts. Boeing and Northrop spokesmen later also declined to say how much their firms give.... ”
22
In keeping with this time-honored Lexington Institute fund-raising tradition, might Peters's honorariums also issue from parties with a stake in the issues he writes and talks about? We hardly expect the Castro regime to fess up in the manner of Boeing and Norththrop. But the court-discovery document provides a pretty good clue.
CHAPTER 16
“Agents of Influence”âCastro's Ladies and Men in the U.S. Media
O
n September 20, 2001, the FBI arrested the enemy spy that had managed the deepest penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in history. The spy's name is Ana Montes and during her 15 years in the Defense Intelligence Agency she operated as an agent for Fidel Castro. At the time of her arrest she had moled her way to the head of the DIA's Latin America division. From here, she greatly influenced (if not actually directed) the Clinton administration's Cuba policy. Today she serves a 25-year sentence in federal prison. She was convicted of “conspiracy to commit espionage,” the same charge against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg carrying the same potential death sentence for what is widely considered the most damaging espionage case since the so-called end of the Cold War. Montes dodged the Rosenbergs' fate primarily through a plea bargain.
1
““Ana Montes compromised our entire program against Cuba, electronic as well as human,” admitted Joel F. Brenner, a national counterintelligence executive. She “passed some of our most sensitive information about Cuba back to Havana,” disclosed then undersecretary for international security, John Bolton.
2
Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Simmons of the DIA had a key role in uncovering Fidel Castro's “queen jewel,” as she came to be known, and sending her to prison. Two years later Castro had
cause to curse Simmons again. “Virtually every member of Cuba's UN mission is an intelligence agent,” revealed Alcibiades Hidalgo, who defected to the U.S. in 2002 after serving as Raul Castro's chief of staff and Cuba's ambassador to the UN.
3
In 2003 Lieut. Col. Simmons helped root out 14 of those Cuban spies, who were promptly expelled from the U.S.
In 23 years as a U.S. military counterintelligence officer, Lieut. Col. Simmons has ended the operations of 80 enemy agents, many of whom are today behind bars. “I believe that the Cuban intelligence service has penetrated the United States government to the same extent that the old East German Stasi once penetrated the West German government,” he said in an interview in 2008.
Retired from the DIA, Lieut. Col. Simmons is now an active reserve officer and a national security consultant who specializes in outing Castro's “agents of influence” in the U.S. “For Cuba, being able to influence policy and elite opinion-makers is equally importantâpossibly even more important than recruiting spies with access to intelligence information,” asserts Norman Bailey, who worked for the office of the director of National Intelligence. That makes Chris Simmons a busy man.
Among the agents of influence identified by Lieut. Col. Simmons are:
*Julia Sweig, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of its Latin America studies division;
*Retired professor Gillian Gunn-Clissold, who headed Georgetown University's Cuba Study Group and served as assistant director of Caribbean programs at Trinity College;
*Professor Alberto Coll, ex-deputy assistant secretary of Defense (1990-93), former professor at the Naval War College, series host of the History Channel and now professor at DePaul University.
*Professor Marifeli Perez-Stable, currently teaching at Florida International University, on the editorial staff of
The Miami Herald
and Vice president of the Washington, DC-based think-tank,
Inter-American Dialogue, a frequent source on Cuba issues for the mainstream media.
4
The media blackout on Chris Simmon's bombshell has been total and understandable. For decades some of those he describes as Castro's agents of influence have been the mainstream media's favorite go-to Cuba experts for interviews, insights, prognostications and sound-bites on Cuba.
Since Fidel Castro's health “hiccup” in the summer of 2006, a cursory search shows that Cuba “experts” from the Inter-American Dialogue have been prime sources for stories by the following news outlets: Reuters, The Associated Press, CNN,
The New York Times, The Washington Post
, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, NPR,
Time, Newsweek
,
The Chicago Tribune
,
The Christian Science Monitor
,
The Nation,
the
International Herald Tribune
,
Los Angeles Times
, the Brookings Institute,
Foreign Affairs
magazine,
Forbes
and the
Latin Business Chronicle
. Throw in the
London Daily Telegraph
, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's
Globe and Mail
and
Der Spiegel
for good measure.
When PBS ran an “American Series” special on Fidel Castro in 2005, most of the show involved an interview with Marifeli Perez-Stable, who is also a member of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations as well as Mexico's Council on Foreign Relations.
According to Chris Simmons, Dr. Perez-Stable also worked as an agent for Cuba's DGI until the early 90's, when a defecting Cuban intelligence officer blew her cover and ended her usefulness to the Castro regime. This defector had been Perez-Stable's Cuban case-officer and Simmons saw the document naming her.
5