Cuba's friendly response to 9-11

DIA Analyst Passed Classified Info, Says FBI

[It certainly is a wondrous thing to see how hard the US government works to counter Cuban efforts to protect its territory from terrorism and subversion, and how utterly incapable of they seem of protecting the US "homefront" from real terrorism.

Obviously, the fanfare over this arrest is designed to partially rehabilitate the reputation of the FBI, who were so busy playing Cold War II against Cuba in Florida that they completing missed the biggest terrorist network of them all.

Note to the Bush Infinite Terror Team: Cuba has proposed that a genuine international effort be made to prevent terrorism, and have offered their assistance and cooperation. You might want to follow up; it sounds like a much better idea than the Incompetence Crusade. ]

Washington Post, September 22, 2001 <www.washingtonpost.com>

by Bill Miller and Walter Pincus

The Defense Intelligence Agency's senior analyst for matters involving Cuba was arrested at her office yesterday and accused of providing classified information about military exercises and other sensitive operations to the Cuban government.

Federal prosecutors said Ana Belen Montes, 44, of Northwest Washington, was working for the Cuban intelligence service while on the U.S. government payroll. The FBI, which had been tailing Montes for months, surprised her at work yesterday morning at Bolling Air Force Base and charged her with conspiracy to deliver U.S. national defense information to Cuba, a capital offense.

A few hours later, Montes sat silently in U.S. District Court as prosecutors said she "knowingly compromised national defense information" and harmed the United States. A magistrate judge ordered her jailed without bond pending a hearing Wednesday.

He also put Montes on a suicide watch at the request of prosecutors. "This is a clandestine agent for the Cuban intelligence service," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Ronald L. Walutes Jr. "This has been going on for quite some time."

Established 40 years ago, the Defense Intelligence Agency today has more than 7,000 military and civilian employees around the world, with its headquarters at Bolling, in Washington. Its job is to produce military intelligence about foreign countries in support of U.S. planning and operations.

One of the DIA's first successes was its role in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

Montes began work at the DIA in 1985 and was assigned to analyze Cuban matters seven years later. As the DIA's senior analyst for Cuba, Montes would have dealt regularly with Cuba watchers from other agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, most particularly from the CIA and the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau.In a court affidavit, FBI agent Stephen A. McCoy said authorities determined that Montes was passing details "about a particular Special Access Program related to the national defense of the United States." An intelligence source said that probably referred to a highly classified intelligence collection system being employed to gather information either by satellite or other technical or human capability.

Another of her alleged disclosures, the affidavit said, was the identity of a U.S. intelligence officer "who was present in an undercover capacity, in Cuba." Although the Cubans apparently did not arrest the individual, the affidavit indicated that "the Cuban government was able to direct its counter-intelligence resources" against the officer. At another time, the affidavit said, Montes informed the Cubans that "we have noticed" the location, number and type of certain Cuban military weapons in Cuba.

She also allegedly shared information about a 1996 war games exercise. "This has been a very important investigation, because it does show our national defense information is still being targeted by the Cuban intelligence service," said Van A. Harp, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Washington field office.

A senior intelligence official shared that assessment, saying, "It is very serious." He added that "it is still too early to say how much damage she may have done." The official pointed out, however, that any information received by Cuba then could have been shared with other foreign governments, causing further harm. A DIA spokesman declined to comment.

The agency cooperated in the FBI's investigation. An official at Cuba's diplomatic mission in Washington declined to discuss the case. Montes, a U.S. citizen born at a U.S. military installation in Germany, is single and lived alone in an apartment in the 3000 block of Macomb Street NW, authorities said.

The FBI searched her residence yesterday and also got a warrant to comb through her 2000 Toyota Echo, a safe-deposit box and her office. Authorities declined to say what led them to focus on Montes or how they believed she became associated with the Cuban government.

They said she communicated with her Cuban handlers via shortwave radios, computer diskettes and pagers, methods employed by a Cuban spy ring based in Florida -- known as the Wasp Network -- that attempted to infiltrate Cuban exile organizations and U.S. military installations. Seven people have been convicted of being part of that organization, including a husband and wife who pleaded guilty yesterday. In charging documents and other court papers, authorities did not directly link Montes to the Florida activities.

One law enforcement source said investigators believe Montes began spying in 1996. According to the FBI's affidavit, the Cuban intelligence service often communicates with overseas agents by broadcasting encrypted messages at high frequencies via shortwave radio. The messages typically are conveyed in a series of numbers and transcribed into Spanish text by a computer program.The FBI obtained court approval to surreptitiously enter Montes's apartment in May and found a shortwave radio and earpiece as well as a laptop computer, the affidavit said.

Agents secretly copied the computer's hard drive and restored text that had been deleted, providing the foundation for many of the allegations, the document added.Since May, agents have followed Montes as she made brief calls on pay telephones outside the National Zoo, gas stations and other locations in Northwest Washington and Maryland, apparently sending encrypted messages to pagers, the affidavit said.

But the affidavit makes no mention of any occasions in which Montes was observed meeting with any suspected accomplices, making drop-offs or picking up money. Before joining the DIA, Montes worked in the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy in the early 1980s. She is a 1979 graduate of the University of Virginia and received a master's degree in 1988 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Montes lived on the second floor of a three-story cooperative building in Cleveland Park. Neighbors said she had resided in the building at least seven or eight years and described her as friendly if quiet.Neighbors said there was nothing unusual about Montes's habits, and they had no idea she had been arrested.

The people they thought were Montes's visitors yesterday afternoon were actually FBI agents, who were observed eating pizza in her apartment.One resident said he had been working with Montes on projects in the building, including improving the mailboxes. Another said Montes once was president of the co-op board.

She was known to work for the federal government, but neighbors said she never talked in detail about her job. After the attack on the Pentagon last week, a neighbor said, he sent her an e-mail and got an emotional response."Right now, I'm not in the mood to talk," she wrote back, saying she was distraught about the terrorists' assault.

Another neighbor, Gretchen Gusich, said Montes let her use her unit this week when Gusich's bathroom had plumbing problems, even leaving a key with her. "She was a good neighbor," Gusich said.

[Staff writers David A. Fahrenthold and Martin Weil and Metro researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.]

(c) 2001 The Washington Post Company

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Miami Herald, September 22, 2001 <www.miami.com/herald/>

by Tim Johnson

WASHINGTON -- FBI agents on Friday detained a 44-year-old senior analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency, a vital part of the U.S. national security establishment, and charged her with providing U.S. national secrets to Cuba.

The information relayed to the Cuban government, according to papers filed in federal court in the District of Columbia, included the identity of a U.S. intelligence officer operating undercover in Cuba.

The woman, Ana Belen Montes, was arrested around 10 a.m. at Defense Intelligence headquarters in the southern part of the capital, FBI spokesman Chris Murray said.

Montes began working at the agency, which provides political and military intelligence to the Pentagon, in 1985 and had risen to a level that gave her access to a wide variety of intelligence, according to a criminal complaint filed in Washington, D.C., federal court.

"Since 1992, she has specialized in Cuba matters. She is currently the senior analyst responsible for matters pertaining to Cuba," the complaint said.

Montes, among more than a dozen arrested by U.S. law enforcement since September 1998 and charged with spying for Cuba, had greater access to secrets than the others. As a senior analyst, she participated in inter-agency meetings involving discussion on Cuba and the rest of Latin America, Capitol Hill sources said.

The criminal complaint said Montes was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979. She also held a master's degree from the prestigious School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

An FBI official, who asked to remain anonymous, said she was Puerto Rican.

According to the court document, Montes maintained contact with her Cuban intelligence agency handlers by calling their beepers from pay phones and punching in coded numerical sequences.

On May 25, brandishing a court-authorized warrant, law enforcement officials secretly entered Montes' second-floor unit at the Cleveland Apartments off Connecticut Avenue in northwest Washington, an area of tony restaurants and stores. They found a portable computer, the complaint said.

"The agents electronically copied the laptop's hard drive. During subsequent analysis of the copied hard drive, the FBI recovered substantial text . . .," it said, adding that 11 pages of material was recovered.

Among the contents, it added, were instructions on how to erase material from the computer, tips for radio reception, and references to "the numbers that you receive via radio." A short-wave radio was also found. The complaint said that the FBI identified text consisting of 150 sets of numerical groups.

"The text begins, -07 24624,' and continues until 150 such groups are listed. The FBI has determined that the precise same numbers, in the precise same order, were broadcast on February 6, 1999, at AM frequency 7887 kHz, by a woman speaking Spanish, who introduced the broadcast with the words 'Atención! Atención!' " the complaint said.

It asserts that the technique of receiving coded data over short-wave radio is common with Cuban intelligence, and is the same method that 10 convicted Cuban spies arrested in South Florida in 1998 used to contact their handlers.

Montes followed other patterns used by convicted South Florida spies, it added, such as exchanging computer disks with Cuban intelligence agents and frequently calling from pay phones to send coded pages to beeper numbers.

The text lifted from her hard drive, it said, included praise from Montes' alleged Cuban handler for her unmasking "a U.S. intelligence officer who was present in an undercover capacity, in Cuba, during a period that began prior to October 1996.

"We told you how tremendously useful the information you gave us from the meetings with him resulted, and how we were waiting here for him with open arms," the text said, according to the complaint.

The ultimate fate of the intelligence officer was not disclosed in the court papers.

As recently as Sunday, surveillance teams spotted Montes making calls from pay phones to beeper numbers and punching in pre-assigned codes, the complaint said.

The FBI said it had pending search warrant requests for Montes' apartment, her red Toyota Echo, her office at Bolling Air Force Base, and for a safe deposit box.

Couple Arrested Last Month Plead Guilty as Unregistered Foreign Agents

Friday's arrest came three weeks after FBI agents detained two Cuban intelligence agents in Florida, husband and wife George and Marisol Gari, and charged them with trying to infiltrate the U.S. Southern Command military facility in Miami, which oversees military operations in Latin America.

The Garis also conducted surveillance of the Cuban American National Foundation offices. They pleaded guilty Thursday to acting as unregistered agents for Cuba.

Members of the Cuban-American community said they suspected that FBI agents moved in to arrest Montes, who had been under surveillance for four months, to stop leaks to Cuba as U.S. forces mount a war on the Osama bin Laden network.

"It was critically important that this spy be stopped now as we embark on the **worldwide war against terrorism,**" said Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart, a Miami Republican.

HAVANA, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Cuba's most important source of cash, tourism, was hit hard by last week's attacks in the United States, and the industry is bracing for more damage if war breaks out, industry officials and workers said this week.

"Events of the magnitude that occurred in the United States have a negative impact on tourism -- creating confusion, airline delays, reasonable fears at the moment, and that leads to cancellations," Tourism Minister Ibrahim Ferradaz told Reuters.

Ferradaz, in Cuba's first official comments on the crisis' economic impact for the Caribbean island, said it was too early to quantify the damage to tourism, but industry sources said it was already significant.

"Sales at the airport are down 70 percent," said a manager at the firm supplying cafeterias and retail shops at Havana's Jose Marti International Airport, the country's largest.

Hotels in Cuba's capital were reported nearly empty, cabs idled waiting for customers, and restaurant managers said business was slower than normal.

"The hotel is almost empty. It is always slow in September, but this is worse. There are no tourists," said an employee at the Havana Libre Hotel, one of the capital's busiest.

The situation at the Varadero beach resort, some 90 miles (140 km) east of Havana and by far the island's most important destination after the capital, was similar, according to tourism workers interviewed by phone this week.

Tourism and related revenues had been expected to exceed $2 billion in 2001, more than half of Cuba's hard currency earnings, while local industry was expected to supply more than 60 percent of goods and services consumed by the leisure sector.

BRACING FOR FURTHER ECONOMIC DAMAGE

Any long-term decline in tourism would prove extremely serious for the communist-governed country, which has depended on the leisure sector to emerge from a decade-long crisis provoked by the collapse of the Soviet Union, analysts said.

Cuban President Fidel Castro and the state-run media have vigorously condemned last week's attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington, but they have just as energetically criticized U.S. war preparations.

"It's too soon to evaluate the situation," Ferradaz said of tourism. "The United States has announced reprisals, military action, which logically lead many people in the world to postpone travel until it is clear what is going to happen."

He added: "We hope tensions ease and that they look for the best possible solutions, but we are also working to deal with these possible difficulties in the coming months."

Industry sources reported economic uncertainty in Europe, the source of more than half of visitors to Cuba, had already threatened the coming January through March main tourism season, before last week's attacks and economic after-shocks.

Making matters worse, and despite the U.S. economic embargo and partial ban on travel to Cuba, Cuban-American and other U.S. travelers numbered some 200,000 last year, making the United States the island's third tourist provider.

"We have had several group cancellations and many groups scheduled to depart in the near future have reduced the number of participants," said Bob Guild, president of the New York-based Marazul travel agency, which specializes in travel to Cuba.

"I believe there is a wait and see attitude for the large number of groups and individuals scheduled to depart in December and January," he added.

Since the appalling terrorist attacks against New York and Washington last Tuesday, I have been mulling over how to put my response into words in order to express to you my feelings. With some of you I have coincided in criticizing U.S. policies; with some of you, who support those policies, I have strongly disagreed. 

Nevertheless, what happened on September 11 is contrary to everything I believe in and I repudiate and condemn it in the strongest way. I can imagine the terror of those who knew they would die in a few minutes, either because they were passengers in the hijacked planes or trapped in the upper floors of both towers in New York. My heart goes to those suffering the irreparable loss of relatives and friends in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am particularly appalled by the murder of small children. I also feel particularly touched by those who died while trying to save lives, like the firefighters of New York. 

The cold-blooded murder of innocent people or even of persons who support or participate in reprehensible policies, as might be the case in the Pentagon, is a despicable crime. I sincerely wish to express to each of you my heartfelt condolences. 

As human beings, we must do whatever we can to eradicate from the face of the earth terrorism in all its forms. I think this requires firm but coherent and balanced policies and a very robust cooperation among all governments. A massive unilateral and violent reaction, much as it might satisfy the instinctive desire for retribution, would just increase the chances for new incidents like this to take place. 

The U.S. government has the responsibility to draw the necessary lessons. Terror is an improper and inappropriate political instrument and it is self-destructive, no matter the alleged reasons. It must not be used as a political expedient by political organizations or by governments. 

Although nothing compares in magnitude and cruelty with the senseless violence exercised in September 11 against Americans, Cubans have suffered terrorist attacks too. A Cuban-American terrorist murdered a friend and colleague of mine who was serving in the Cuban Mission to the U.N. in the streets of New York precisely on September 11, 1980. The intellectual and material executioners are still at large and live in Florida, even though the U.S. and Cuban governments know who they are. 

Cuba has cooperated with U.S. authorities in the struggle against terrorism, passing along information on assassination attempts, as was the case even during the Reagan administration. Yet Cuba is classified as a terrorist country by the State Department, even though it is well known that the Cuban Government has never supported any kind of act against American civilians or officials of the kind that took place last Tuesday. Cuba's offer of support in whatever we can help reflects a clear hope that we might cooperate on this issue beyond our differences. 

Let me reiterate once again that I sincerely reject and revile the dastardly actions of September 11 and those responsible for them. All the best,

Carlos Alzugaray

Dr. Carlos Alzugaray Treto,
Profesor Titular,
Vicerrector de Investigaciones a.i.,
Instituto Superior de Relaciones Internacionales,
Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores,
Calle 22 No. 111,
Miramar, Playa,
Habana 11300, Cuba.

Telefonos: (53-7) 22-2571, 22-3593 & 23-5097
Fax: (53-7) 29-0683

Email: alzugarayc@isri.minrex.gov.cu

(c) 2001 Radio Habana Cuba, NY Transfer News. All rights reserved.