Were `mishaps' sabotage?

Published Wednesday, October 14, 1998, in the Miami Herald

Were `mishaps' sabotage?

Cuban exiles rethink embarrassing episodes in light of spy ring

By CAROL ROSENBERG
Herald Staff Writer

The mishap occurred amid the confusion of the aborted September 1995 Democracia Flotilla: Somehow the plugs came out of two small vessels, causing the boats to founder off Key West and leaving the impression that these anti-Castro activists were inept and endangered lives with their protest at sea.

Was it another hapless happening in four decades of ill-fated Cuban exile activities? Or was it something more?

Ever since authorities announced last month that the FBI cracked a 10-member Cuban espionage ring, some exile activists have been looking back at embarrassing episodes for traces that the ring engaged in the stock-in-trade of secret intelligence operations: dirty tricks.

``We always suspected that there could have been sabotage,'' said Ramon Saul Sanchez, leader of the Democracia Movement, which organized the flotilla three years ago that was aborted when another boat sank.

``Now we're going through footage'' of photos and videotapes from the flotilla in search of evidence that any of the spying suspects were near the boats when the plugs were pulled.

Dirty tricks, or covert actions as spy agencies call them, are not the exclusive province of foreign agents. Many Americans associate the expression with the Watergate-era hi-jinks of President Nixon's political operatives, who placed advertisements and spread other misinformation to smear the Republican Party's political enemies.

And Cuban exile groups have long suspected Castro agents in their midst have made them look, in the words of a sympathetic anti-Communist aide on Capitol Hill, ``goofier than they already are.''

But now that a new ring has been exposed, exile activists say they have reason to rethink episodes that at the time seemed odd, but now may reveal something deeper.

A prominent South Florida politician, for example, said his wife watched the suspects being led to court on television and recognized one as a man who hung around a political rally earlier this year snapping pictures. He struck the politician's wife as bizarre, said the official who spoke on condition he not be identified.

Now, he wonders, what was the fellow really trying to do?

Given the sensitivity of the subject -- the most public exposure of a South Florida-based Castro spy ring ever, after years of simply shadowing them -- federal prosecutors and agents aren't detailing the operatives' activities.

But court papers hint at some of them:

The indictment says a key objective of the spy ring was not only to infiltrate and inform on Cuban exile organizations but also to manipulate ``anti-Castro Cuban political groups in Miami-Dade County.''

Spymaster Manuel Viramontes, described in court documents as John Doe No. 1 because authorities still don't know his real identity, supposedly instructed Nilo and Linda Hernandez to pose as ``an anti-Castro figure'' and write a menacing letter to a U.S. senator. Authorities refuse to identify the lawmaker and the Hernandezes, who pleaded guilty to acting as unregistered foreign agents, are in a federal jail awaiting sentencing.

Members were also supposed to insinuate themselves in Camacol, the Latin American Chamber of Commerce, whose executives have not detected any outside influence. Alpha 66 was another reported supposed target. But members say the only contact with the spy ring they have detected so far was that one alleged spy supposedly asked for -- and got, gratis -- a copy of an easily available history book on the group of aging anti-Castro militiamen who train in the Everglades.

So what were the suspected spies trying to do? Did any of their political manipulation actually succeed?

Former KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who does not know the South Florida Cuban spy case firsthand, says campaigns to cast doubt on the trustworthiness of activists were part of a classic Soviet bloc Cold War strategy.

``Disinformation campaigns were, I would say, the very soul of intelligence,'' says Kalugin, who now lives in suburban Washington, D.C. ``What is espionage? You simply collect information through clandestine methods. But building up a major organization or a group of people or specific individuals to single out as targets for slander or subversion, this was the thrust of Soviet intelligence operations in the old days.''

And, during the Cold War, says Kalugin, who visited Cuba as a KGB man in the 1970s, ``the Cubans were very good disciples. They, in fact, in certain areas were better than the Soviets because they were less concerned about potential political repercussions.''

Whereas the Soviets in their dwindling days had diplomatic concerns -- the fear that an espionage exposure could derail political or potential trade benefits -- the Cubans were ``more reckless'' in their U.S. operations.

That's because, he said, thanks to the U.S. economic embargo, they have nothing to lose politically or diplomatically.

Of keen interest to both Sanchez and Jose Basulto, founder of the Brothers to the Rescue organization, is whether investigators have found any connection between one suspect -- Cuban-American Rene Gonzalez, 32 -- and Juan Pablo Roque, a former Brothers pilot and FBI informer.

Roque turned up in Havana just days after Cuban MiGs shot down two Brothers aircraft in February 1995 -- and denounced the organization as packed with violent provocateurs, a humiliation because it revealed the level of Communist infiltration of the search-and-rescue group. Further, both Gonzalez and Roque were members of the exile group before the shootdown, which killed four South Florida men.

But federal prosecutors -- who are investigating the shootdown and prosecuting the spy ring -- won't say whether investigators established a clear link between the two.

Basulto said in an interview that Gonzalez was the first person to arrive at the Brothers' Opa-locka hangar after the 1995 tragedy. And he wasn't even an active duty member.

Although a prominent defector, because he came to South Florida in 1990 in a stolen Cuban crop duster, Gonzalez had been suspended from flying with the Brothers by Basulto because unsubstantiated rumors were circulating that Gonzalez was involved with drugs.

But why would a spy risk his cover by mixing with the illegal drug trade? ``If you are with Brothers to the Rescue and you are identified as a drug dealer, you have accomplished your purpose,'' said Basulto, explaining that Gonzalez's job could have been to tarnish his group.

Gonzalez then moved on to join the Democracia Movement, where he became an officer.

Other curious pre-shootdown events that Basulto now wonders about include: a mechanic's discovery that cables had been cut in an airplane's control panel, a weight attached to the propeller of Basulto's airplane, and the discovery of metal particles in the oil drum of another aircraft.

``We have been sabotaged,'' Basulto said.