Miami Herald, 3 Sep 2010: The U.S. State Department Thursday flatly denied reports that the Obama administration is considering swapping the “Cuban Five” spies in U.S. prisons for a U.S. government subcontractor jailed in Havana. The denial came a day after Cuban-Americans in Congress expressed concern over reports of a deal to free Alan Gross, held without charges since his arrest in Havana on Dec. 3.
“The United States is NOT considering the release of any member of the Cuban Five in exchange for Alan Gross,” Mark Toner, director of the State Department’s press office, wrote in a statement e-mailed to El Nuevo Herald on Thursday. “We are committed to using every possible diplomatic channel to press for Mr. Gross’s release, but we will not consider a `prisoner swap,’ ” Toner added. “We continue to urge the Cuban Government to release Alan Gross immediately.”
In letters Wednesday to the Departments of State and Justice, the five Cuban-Americans in Congress wrote that they were “seriously concerned about increasing reports that the Administration is conducting negotiations with the Castro regime” for a swap.
“The U.S. must be careful not to telegraph to rogue regimes that they may be able to successfully extort our government by abducting innocent Americans,” said South Florida Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln and Mario Diaz Balart and New Jersey Democrats Sen. Bob Menendez and Rep. Albio Sires. They noted that one of the “Cuban Five” convicted in Miami in 2001 was found guilty of playing a role in Cuba’s shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996 that killed four South Floridians. . . . .
Big Journalism, 17 Aug 2010: . . . “Castro poses no significant threat to the U.S. or any of his hemispheric neighbors. No evidence exists that Cuba is trying to foment any instability in the Western Hemisphere,” asserted the Clinton Defense Department’s “National Intelligence Estimate on Cuba.”
From Havana Castro immediately hailed the report as “an objective report by serious people.”
This report was authored by the Clinton Defense Department’s Ana Belen Montes, a champion of cultural and educational exchanges with Cuba, in which she partook abundantly. During the Clinton administration Ana Montes was awarded the “Certificate of Distinction,” the third-highest honor awarded by any U.S. Intelligence agency. Her diligence, brilliance and sagacity led the Clinton team to promote Ana Montes to head the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Cuba division, an ideal post to better champion her enlightened policy of “openness” and “sharing” with Castro’s Cuba.
Ana Montes had access to all U.S. intelligence on Cuba and led briefings on Capitol Hill, at the State Department and the Pentagon regarding her enlightened Cuban policy. “On Cuba,” one government official said. “Montes was who you went to.”
Thus pampered, promoted and honored under Clinton, Montes today serves a 25-year prison sentence for “Conspiracy to Commit Espionage.” . . .
. . . “Montes passed some of our most sensitive information about Cuba back to Havana,” said then Undersecretary for International Security, John Bolton. “Ana Montes compromised our entire program against Cuba, electronic as well as human,” admitted Joel F. Brenner, National Counterintelligence Executive. The Montes case is widely considered the most damaging espionage case since the “end” of the Cold War. . . .
. . . . “For Cuba, being able to influence policy and elite opinion-makers is equally important — possibly even more important — than recruiting spies with access to intelligence information,” explained Norman Bailey, a high official in the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. . . . .
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 159– An Introduction to Cuban Intelligence and Counterintelligence Methodologies
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 205–National Security Policy and Counterintelligence Implications of Denial and Deception Practices
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 140–Women in Espionage: Intrigue, Myths and Truths
Wall Street Journal, 20 July 2010: . . . That’s the case of Vicky Peláez, a naturalized American from Peru who was busted for allegedly delivering information to Russian agents in South America in exchange for cash. She pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and was allowed to leave the country. Peláez’s husband was one of the 10 but he is Russian—though he masqueraded as Uruguayan—and his motives could be chalked up to patriotism.
But how to explain Peláez? And how to explain that she got off so easily? Until her arrest two weeks ago Peláez was a columnist for El Diario-La Prensa, the largest and oldest Spanish-language daily in New York. We still don’t know the nature of the information she transported for Russia, but she certainly seemed to hate the America that took her in and let her make a good living attacking its interests.
Even by the standards of much of the Latin press, Peláez was hard left. Two of her former colleagues at the paper say she had photos of Shining Path terrorist Abimael Guzman and Che Guevara hanging in her cubicle. They also say she referred to the Cuban-Americans who worked in her office as “gusanos” (maggots), the term Fidel Castro uses for Cuban exiles.
Peláez published regular anti-U.S. diatribes and routinely praised Castro, and the paper adopted her politics in its news coverage. Sometime in the late 1990s Peláez was made Latin American desk editor. Her work, as well as that of former El Diario editor-in-chief Gerson Borrero, was reprinted in Granma, Cuba’s state newspaper. Justo Sánchez, who was once the paper’s editor for arts and culture, described her articles as “poorly disguised agit-prop.”
Mr. Sánchez adds that it was common knowledge around the newsroom that the Cuban government paid for Peláez’s trip to the island in 2006. . . .
Reuters, 14 July 2010: An American couple who has pleaded guilty to spying for Cuba will be sentenced on Friday after a debriefing prosecutors said was tarnished but did not breach their plea agreement.
Former State Department official Walter Kendall Myers, who had access to classified information, and his wife, Gwendolyn, who worked at a bank, pleaded guilty to charges that they worked for Cuban intelligence for three decades.
As part of their plea agreement, Kendall Myers, 73, agreed to a sentence of life in prison while his wife, 72, agreed to be imprisoned for up to seven-and-a-half years as long as the government was satisfied with their cooperation in interviews.
Some debriefings “were marred by both of the defendants’ lack of recollection or inconsistencies and contradictions,” prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum filed last week. “There were times when the FBI assessed that Kendall Myers, in particular, gave inconsistent or uncooperative responses or was intentionally withholding information,” prosecutors said. . . . .
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 159– An Introduction to Cuban Intelligence and Counterintelligence Methodologies
McClatchy Newspapers, 10 July 2010: A Washington, D.C., couple who spent 30 years spying for Cuba are asking a federal judge to recommend that they be incarcerated near each other – but not in Florida, where they say the federal prisons “will likely have populations of Cuban-Americans who might react strongly to their offense.”
Walter Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers pleaded guilty in November to sending secrets to the United States’ longtime antagonist. They are scheduled to be sentenced Friday before U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton.
Walter Myers – a former State Department employee with top-secret clearance – agreed to a life sentence without parole and to cooperate with the federal government in a deal that offered his wife a much lighter sentence than the 20 years she might have faced at trial. In court documents filed late Friday, the couple’s defense attorneys are asking Walton to sentence Gwendolyn Myers to the low end of the plea deal – six years, rather than seven-and-a-half years. . . .
. . . . . Government prosecutors, however, are asking for the maximum sentence, with U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen writing that the couple “committed one of the worst crimes a citizen can perpetrate against his or her own country – espionage on behalf of a long-standing foreign adversary.”
In addition, he noted that “without Gwendolyn Myers’s deference to, if not active support and encouragement of, seemingly everything her husband did, (Walter) Kendall Myers’s desire to become a Cuban spy 30 years ago may well have been short-lived.”
At one point, he calls her “far more than just a knowing wife of a spy,” noting that they both were recruited by Cuban intelligence and that she, like her husband, had a code name supplied by the Cubans. “He was Agent 202. She was Agent 123,” Machen wrote. “She not only supported and encouraged her husband’s theft of U.S. secrets from the Department of State, but she also actively engaged in their espionage.”
Machen argued that her “criminal culpability” was greater than other past spouses of spies, including Rosario Ames, the wife of Russian spy Aldrich Ames, and Anne Case Pollard, the wife of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. “Unlike Gwendolyn Myers, neither Rosario Ames nor Anne Pollard decrypted coded messages from, assisted in the transmission of classified information to, nor had repeated, substantive operational meets with, the foreign intelligence service at issue,” he said. . . .
♦ CI CENTRE COURSE: 159– An Introduction to Cuban Intelligence and Counterintelligence Methodologies
