The Longest Romance (28 page)

“I'm sick and tired of these McCarthyite tactics,” Perez-Stable was quoted in a
Miami Herald
article regarding Simmons's accusation. “I supported the Cuban revolution in the 1970's. Over the course of the 1980's, I had a change of heart.”
⁶

Problem is, Chris Simmons cites a meeting by Ms. Perez-Stable with her Cuban case-officer held as late as mid-1991 in Ottawa, Canada.

“This is nothing more than a witch hunt,” said
Miami Herald
editor Joe Oglesby about Simmons's charges. “This is character-assassination and these issues have been raised and dealt with in the past.”
⁷

Yes, the issue has been raised in the past. Problem is, the only “dealing with it” by
The Miami Herald was
to bury it, look around furtively and hope that few noticed. In a written response to
She Miami Herald
, Professor Alberto Coll said: “‘These are baseless and scurrilous allegations without a shred of evidence, presented by someone eager to make a quick buck in Miami by selling his book.”
⁸

Problem is, in May, 2005 Professor Coll was found guilty of lying to federal authorities about the purpose of a visit to Cuba. The Naval War College then suspended his access to classified material.

So why aren't these “agents of influence” either in jail or being prosecuted? I asked retired Lieut. Col. Simmons.

“As a counterintelligence officer my job was to identify and neutralize foreign agents,” he explained, “to prevent them from doing more damage to my country. One way to accomplish this is to get a conviction for not registering as agents of a foreign government. This usually takes hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. But it's often easier, also easier on the taxpayer, to simply neutralize them by ‘outing' the ones who knowingly had contacts with Cuban intelligence agencies and putting both them and their media cohorts on full alert that U.S counterintelligence is on to their game. I've obviously received clearance to mention the above names.”
⁹

That element of knowing is crucial. The Castro regime is famous for the hospitality provided by the official hosts and attendants it assigns the thousands upon thousands of U.S. visitors—legislators, scholars, journalists, ecclesiastics, businessmen, cultural ambassadors—who somehow breach the brutal “U.S. blockade” every year to visit Cuba. Point is, virtually every official visitor to Cuba from the U.S. has some form of contact with Cuban
intelligence. But most are unaware of the true professional identity of their charming guides, dinner companions, taxi drivers, etc.

Chris Simmons also based his accusations against the Inter-American Dialogue's vice president partly on an FBI debriefing of a Cuban intelligence defector named Jesus Perez-Mendez, who had worked closely with Dr. Perez-Stable's Cuban case-officer. This defector revealed that in the early 80's Cuba's DGI appointed Dr. Perez-Stable as head of a division within their “Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples” (ICAP, in Spanish), which fronted as an “educational” and “cultural-exchange” group. “The DGI prepared Perez-Stable's annual schedule in the U.S.,” disclosed Perez-Mendez. “She receives $100 for every tourist that travels to Cuba with this group.”
¹⁰

This same ICAP, by the way, sponsored the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's visit to Cuba in 1984. So it's likely that Jeremiah Wright unwittingly earned Ms. Marifeli Perez-Stable a C-note—and tax-free, it appears.

“I have been affiliated with the Cuban Council of Churches since the 1980s,” boasted Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a sermon on July 16, 2006. “I have several close Cuban friends who work with the Cuban Council of Churches and you have heard me preach about our affiliation and the Black Theology Project's trips to Cuba. The Cuban Council of Churches has been a non-partisan global mission partner for decades. I have worked with them for two decades.”
¹¹

Non-partisan, Reverend Wright? Not according to Cuban intelligence defector Juan Vives, who from hands-on experience reports that the Cuban Council of Churches is in fact an arm of Cuba's ICAP, itself an arm of Cuba's KGB-founded and mentored DGI. The ICAP's long-time chieftain was Rene Rodriguez Cruz,
who by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's own admission might have been one of his “friends.”

Rodriguez's meteoric rise through Cuba's Stalinist bureaucracy was facilitated by his diligence as an early executioner, often beating out even Che Guevara and Raul Castro in his zeal to shatter the firing-squad victim's skull with a
coup de grace
from his .45. On November 5, 1982 a Dade County, Florida, grand jury indicted Rene Rodriguez Cruz for smuggling drugs into the U.S.

This murderer headed a Cuban agency that Jeremiah Wright “worked with for decades” by his own admission, and whose staff he regards as “friends.” These friends arranged the visit for the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his 300-person entourage to Havana in 1984, which included Rev. Wright.

“Viva Fidel!” bellowed Reverend Jackson while concluding his speech at the University of Havana during that visit. “Viva Che Guevara! Long live our cry of freedom!”
¹²

“He [Jesse Jackson] is a great personality,” reciprocated a beaming Fidel Castro, “a brilliant man with a great talent, capable of communicating with people, very persuasive, reliable, and honest. Jackson's main characteristic is honesty. He is sincere and there is not a single bit of demagoguery in his conversations.”

You gotta love that last point.

“
Julia Sweig is director for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
” (NPR)

 

“Julia Sweig heads the Latin American division for the Council on Foreign Relations.”
(Stephen Colbert)

 

“Julia E. Sweig is senior fellow and director of Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.”
(New York Times)

When Stephen Colbert introduced Julia Sweig on his show—July 15, 2008, and May 11, 2009—as the head of the Council on Foreign Relations Latin American division he was correct but incomplete. After all, this is the same brief bio used for Julia Sweig by the
Daily Beast, Foreign Affairs
,
The New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
,
The Washington Post
, NPR, PBS and the many other media-outlets that feature her expertise. None of these mentions that she also boasts warm friendship and close collaboration with Castroite terrorists whose plans for New York would have put the death-toll from 9/11 in second place. Some background:

On November 17, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI cracked a plot by Cuban agents that targeted Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdale's and Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The explosions were timed for the following week, the day after Thanksgiving. Macy's gets 50,000 shoppers that one day.

Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children—given the date and targets, probably mostly women and children—were to be incinerated and entombed.

At the time, the FBI relied heavily on HUMINT (human intelligence). They'd expertly penetrated the plot, identified the ringleaders and had them tapped. One by one the ringleaders were ambushed and arrested. Among these were Cuban DGI agents Jose Gomez Abad and Elsa Montero, who worked as “diplomats” in Cuba's UN mission. Alas, they enjoyed “diplomatic immunity” and were soon back in Cuba as heroes instead of in the electric chair at Sing Sing.

The FBI speculated that as many as 30 others might have been in on the plot, but the above-named were the head honchos. The intent and will of those Castroite terrorists to commit mass-murder was certainly present; only our crackerjack FBI of the time foiled it.

We turn now to the acknowledgments in Julia Sweig's award-winning book published in 2003, entitled
Inside the Cuban Revolution:

“In Cuba many people spent long hours with me, helped open doors I could not have pushed through myself, and offered friendship and warmth to myself during research trips to the island . . . Elsa Montero and Jose Gomez Abad championed this project.”

Sweig also thanks Ramon Sanchez Parodi, Jose Antonio Arbesu, Fernando Miguel Garcia, Hugo Ernesto Yedra and Josefina Vidal for their “warmth, their friendship and their kindness in opening Cuban doors.”

Chris Simmons identifies every one of the above as Cuban DGI agents. Josefina Vidal was booted from the U.S. in 2003 for espionage, after Simmons himself fingered her.

“The main interest of the book,” gushed London's prestigious
Financial Times
about Julia Sweig's
Inside the Cuban Revolution,
“is that it is primarily based on original interviews and previously inaccessible records.”

No doubt. But might KGB-trained officials in the service of a Stalinist regime possibly have had an agenda during those interviews and in cherry-picking which records to disclose—not to mention welcoming Sweig into Cuba to begin with?

I haven't checked Guinness, but effusively thanking ten different intelligence agents of a terror-sponsoring enemy nation in your book's acknowledgements—three of whom were expelled from the U.S. for terrorism or espionage—must be some kind of record, at least for someone outside a maximum-security federal prison.

Not that in media eyes this affects Sweig's position as an impartial expert on issues pertaining to the terror-sponsoring enemy nation. “A nonpartisan resource for information and analysis,” boasts the intro to the Council on Foreign Relations, which features Julia Sweig as its Latin America expert.

“In 1998, a comprehensive review by the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Cuba does not pose a threat to U.S. national
security,” states the Council on Foreign Relations website. Perhaps overlooked by the Council is that this comprehensive review was authored by the Clinton Defense Department's Ana Montes, who dodged the fate of the Rosenbergs with a plea-bargain and is currently serving a 25-year stretch in federal prison for the crime of espionage. The Montes case ranks as the most damaging (for us) spy case since the “end” of the Cold War.

In September 2010
The Atlantic's
Jeffrey Goldberg's copped the first interview with Fidel Castro since the Stalinist dictator's near-death crisis in 2006. Goldberg thanked Julia Sweig for arranging the visit, describing her as “a friend at the Council on Foreign Relations” and “a preeminent expert on Cuba and Latin America.”

“We shook hands,” writes Goldberg about meeting Castro. “Then
he greeted Julia warmly
. They [Castro and Sweig] have known each other for more than 20 years.” (emphasis mine)

CHAPTER 17

“Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly, even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!”
(NBC's Andrea Mitchell)

 

“Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful.”
(ABC's Barbara Walters)

 

“Why did Elian's mother leave Cuba? What was she escaping? By all accounts this young woman was living the good life
.” (NBC's Jim Avila, April 2000)

 

“
[Raul Castro's wife Vilma Espin] was a champion of women's rights and greatly improved the status of women in Cuba, a society known for its history of machismo.”
(
The Washington Post
, June 18th 2007)

“O
nly minutes after my arrival at the Hotel Riviera in Havana, I was told to be in his office within 15 minutes,” wrote Barbara Walters about her first interview with Fidel Castro in May 1977. “There I found a very courtly, somewhat portly Fidel Castro.
He apologized for making me wait for two years and said that now he wanted to cooperate. Castro suggested that he personally escort us on a visit to other parts of the country, and he gave me the choice of places. I selected the Bay of Pigs and the Sierra Maestra ...