Venezuela: Cuba's Spy Apparatus, a Conduit of Latin America Insurgency
By Jerry
Brewer
To
effectively monitor aggression, interference
and other forms of insurgency within
their homelands, democracies throughout the Americas must immediately
address their governments'
counterintelligence missions.
Cuba's Intelligence Directorate (DI),
formerly known as the Dirección General de Inteligencia,
or DGI, has been and remains a contingency of very
well-trained, organized and financed
agents of covert and hostile espionage throughout the Americas and
elsewhere.
The Cuban
DI is responsible for all foreign intelligence collection. The 40-year
history
of the nefarious operations of the
DI has included active involvement in aiding leftist and dictatorial
movements in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
With
Castro's recent subterfuge
of renaissance into quasi-capitalism
and a modicum of professed freedoms - one for the decades, many people
are demanding
that the U.S. trade embargo, in
place since 1960, be lifted.
The
truth
is that Cuban espionage has been
linked to villainous associations with the Chinese and Iranians, as well
as with Venezuela.
As well, a report from the U.S.
Defense Intelligence Agency indicates that Cuba has been expanding
intelligence operations
with others in the Middle East and
South Asia.
Cuba
has trained
thousands of communist guerrillas
and terrorists, and has sponsored violent acts of aggression and
subversion in most democratic
nations of the southwestern
hemisphere. U.S. government studies within the intelligence community
documented a total of 3,043
international terrorist incidents in
the decade of 1968 to 1978. Within that study, "over 25 percent
occurred in Latin
America."
President
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has adopted the previous
Soviet-styled Cuban intelligence
service as his model for Venezuela's security service, while utilizing
Cuban intelligence
counterparts and advisors as his
primary sources on security and intelligence. Moreover, resisting U.S.
drug and terrorism
interdiction throughout South
America has been a busy agenda of Chavez.
Chavez
is perceived to be the mentor of
Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, a former coca grower's union leader
who recently,
while seeking to normalize
diplomatic relations with Washington, stated that the DEA is not welcome
in his country.
In
2009 Ecuador refused to renew the ten-year lease to the United States at
Manta airbase,
an action that was dismissed simply
with language describing a revision of the nation's Constitution under
President Rafael
Correa's leadership. The
Constitution "bans foreign military bases" on Ecuadorian soil.
Still, the successes of the U.S. Southern Command and drug enforcement operators in Latin America are well-documented.
As
well, Panama, Colombia and Peru recognized the critical need to fight
narcotrafficking
and terrorism, and quickly expressed
interest in alliances with U.S. efforts. The success of Colombia
against the FARC guerrillas,
as well as Mexico's valiant fight
against its narcoterrorist organized crime insurgents, represent either
one becoming
part of the solution or a part of
the problem.
Getting
back to Chavez,
reports link his government with
radical terrorist organizations and other state sponsors of terrorism.
Hezbollah fundraising
activities, in the form of
"financial transactions," on Margarita Island in Venezuela have been
widely reported.
According
to General Marcos Ferreira, a former Venezuelan Intelligence
Director, Chavez gave instructions
to "destroy records" on ten suspected Hezbollah fundraisers conducting
suspicious
financial transactions on the
islands of Margarita, Aruba and Curaçao, and in the cities of Maracaibo
and Valencia.
Margarita
Island appears to be the center of an extensive terrorist financial
network stretching
throughout the Caribbean to Panama,
and the Cayman Islands, where three Afghanis traveling on false
Pakistani passports were
caught entering from Cuba with
$200,000 in cash in August of 2001. According to British colonial
authorities, efforts to launder
the money through Cayman banks also
involved a group of Arab businessmen.
The
deployment of the Cuban Intelligence
Service in Venezuela is so deep that its agents enjoy "direct access"
to President
Chávez, and often provide
information not shared with local intelligence services, as indicated by
cables sent from
the U.S. Embassy in Caracas to the
State Department,
Chávez
has
tried to indoctrinate the Venezuelan
military, bringing in thousands of advisers to replicate Cuban military
doctrine, and
to deal with security and
intelligence issues. Cuban officers are deeply involved in intelligence
and security matters in
Venezuela, from the acquisition of
military equipment to overall military strategy. The number of Cuban
intelligence experts
working in Venezuela is reported to
be around 3,000.
Too, reports place
FARC and ELN guerrillas from Colombia in safe havens in Cuba.
And,
prior
to Vicente Fox becoming president of
Mexico, there was a reported "gentleman's agreement" between Mexico and
Cuba - that "Havana intelligence
could operate in Mexico, largely against U.S. targets, as long as Havana
did not meddle
in Mexico's internal affairs." Cuba
continues to maintain a large intelligence-gathering hub in Mexico City.
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Jerry Brewer is C.E.O. of Criminal Justice International Associates, a global threat mitigation
firm headquartered in northern Virginia. His website is located at http://www.cjiausa.org/.
Etiquetas: Hezbollah, narcoterrorismo, terrorismo
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