American Enterprise Institute

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

9:45 a.m.	Registration
10:00	Presenter:	Scott Carmichael, Defense Intelligence Agency
	Discussants:	Norman Bailey, Institute of World Politics
		Paul Crespo, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
	Moderator:	Roger F. Noriega, AEI
11:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Roger Noriega:  Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.  Thank you very much for joining us here at AEI for this rather extraordinary session on espionage by Cuba in the United States, its implications for us and our security, and what it tells us about our own intelligence community.  I thought we would have very little chance of getting our speaker here because of my familiarity from the Congress’ vantage point with our intelligence community. 

I thought we’d have very little chance of getting Scott Carmichael here.  Then it occurred to me that he wrote a book, which is sort of unusual, and he still has his job.  It is a book that I have read, and I hope that many of you have read as well.  You have an opportunity to obtain the book here.  I remember a look on the face of an author friend of mine when I said I got your book from the library.  Authors don’t want to hear that you checked out their book or that you’re intrigued by their concepts.  They want you to buy their book. 

At any rate, that’s not what he is here to do.  I will note parenthetically that the proceeds from his book will go to the family of Greg Fronius, who was a Special Operations officer killed in El Salvador within weeks of Ana Montes visiting the camp where he was working.  We’re going to ask Scott Carmichael about what he thinks the impact of the Ana Montes espionage has been on our security.  What are the implications of the fact that we had a Cuban spy writing the Pentagon’s playbook for much of Latin America, and definitely with respect to Cuba? 

Scott Carmichael is a senior security and counterintelligence investigator for the Defense Intelligence Agency.  He served as a lead case agent for this DIA case on the Ana Montes espionage, which was carried on for most of a decade.  He has been investigating attempts by foreign intelligence services to penetrate the DIA operations worldwide for nearly 20 years.  Prior to that, he was a Chinese Mandarin linguist in the U.S. Navy and a special agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.  His contributions toward the successful resolution of national security matters have earned Mr. Carmichael the DIA Civilian Expeditionary Medal and Award for Meritorious Civilian Service, the Defense Intelligence Director’s Award, the Department of Defense Counterintelligence Award, and the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement, among other awards and various forms of recognition for his government service. 

Prior to his work with the DIA, Mr. Carmichael was a special agent with the National Criminal Investigation Service and a police officer in the great state of Wisconsin.  We have asked him to talk about the Montes case, and I think he will tell us a little bit about his views on whether there are others in our foreign policy making or intelligence analysis community today.

Scott Carmichael:  Well, whoever heard of Ana Belen Montes?  It’s funny; Ana was arrested just ten days after 9/11, just a few days after the FBI had initiated its investigation of the anthrax incidents.  President Bush had just announced his global war on terrorism.  We were gearing up for Operation Enduring Freedom to oust the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan.  All of those stories were dominating the media at that time, and then Ana was arrested.  Scant attention was by the media to Ana.  She was one of the most devastating spies of the modern era. 

Who had ever heard of Ana Montes?  Very few people even equate her with people like Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who committed espionage for Russia, Alder James, or even John Walker, the old Navy spy.  And yet, the damage caused by Ana Montes was exceptionally grave and equal to the damage committed by all of those that I’ve named.  Ana was amazing.  She was actually recruited by the Cubans in late 1984.  They encouraged her to gain employment where she might gain access to information that would be of interest to Cuba.  That’s why she applied for employment with the DIA. 

We brought her onboard on the 30th of September, 1985.  At that time, she was a fully recruited Cuban agent.  She came to us with the full intention of spying against us.  She spied against us for 16 years until the date of her arrest on the 21st of September, 2001.  She was no ordinary analyst at DIA.  She was actually a model employee; she was an exceptional employee.  Consequently, she was no ordinary spy.  Ana rose very quickly through the ranks.  Initially, she was a specialist in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.  Back in the mid-1980s, El Salvador and Nicaragua were the hot issues.  Ana was right in the middle of it. 

By 1992, she’d qualified for the DCI’s exceptional analyst program.  It’s program that not every analyst participates in, but Ana had already proven herself to be exceptional.  She spent a year of her life doing nothing but studying a topic of her choice.  The topic that she chose to study was the effect that the declining Cuban economy was having on the Cuban military.  Thereafter, she became a Cuba specialist.  From 1992 until the date of her arrest, Ana was a Cuba specialist.  She rose to become our senior Cuban analyst in the agency, and largely recognized as the senior Cuba specialist in the entire intelligence community. 

Her colleagues commonly referred to Ana as the “Queen of Cuba.”  If you ever sat in on a meeting Ana, in which you were expressing views that might contradict her own, you’d find out very quickly why they referred to her as the Queen of Cuba.  She was very assertive and always well prepared.  Ana had the most amazing work ethic that I’ve ever seen in anybody.  She would come into work at eight o’clock in the morning. 

While most of us might engage in a little chit-chat with our coworkers and maybe a cup of coffee to ease into the day, Ana would straight to her desk, sit down, and pick up where she’d left off the day before.  She’d work straight through to lunch.  At lunchtime, she’d go downstairs to get a tray from the cafeteria, bring it upstairs, and work through lunch.  She’d continue to work until five o’clock when she’d be out the door.  She always had her nose to the grindstone.  She was always prepared.  Anybody who’s familiar with the intelligence today will understand the kind of access that she had. 

This morning I could go into work and pull up the intelligence briefing as provided to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on my screen in seconds.  I could pull up the latest intelligence that’s coming in from all over the world from every intelligence agency anywhere.  Every intelligence publication or product that’s been written for decades going back could be pulled up on my screen.  Every single finished intelligence publication all the way back to the 1960s is now available online.  I could pull every one of those in a matter of seconds.  Ana had much greater access than I had. 

One of the special access programs to which Ana was indoctrinated was so sensitive that I was not even allowed to be indoctrinated into that program during the course of the investigating.  It was deemed to be too sensitive and I had no need to know about it.  We know that Ana had compromised that program for the Cubans.  She was just an amazing person.  When people ask me why I wrote this book they sort of assume that it’s because I wanted to get the word out about Ana Montes, and to maybe further vilify this person who hurt us so badly, but that’s not the case at all. 

The reason I wrote this book was because I wanted to heighten public awareness to the threat that continues to be posed to our national security by the Cuban intelligence operations targeted against the United States.  Why should we be concerned about that?  We believe Cuba shares her information and intelligence with other countries, like Iran, China, Russia, and other countries of interest that are maybe inimical to those of the United States. 

Do we have other Cuban spies among us?  I believe it’s more than likely.  I base that belief in part on some simple deductive reasoning.  The Cuban intelligence service is among the most professional and capable in the world.  We have to doff our hats at them.  They really are good at what they do.  They are highly motivated to penetrate the United States government.  Why?  Because they perceive us to be the greatest threat to their very existence. 

They have no choice.  They have to penetrate the United States government to find out what we’re doing, what we plan to do, and how we’re going to do it so they can counter our efforts.  The ease with which they recruited Ana Montes strongly suggests to me that they succeeded with others.  When she was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University right here in town in the mid-1980s, she was very vocal about her disagreement with the U.S. government’s policies, especially toward Nicaragua at the time. 

Cuban government has eyes and ears everywhere.  They learned about her views and simply asked her if she’d be willing to help, and she agreed.  That’s how difficult it was to recruit one of the most devastating spies in our history.  If it was that easy to recruit Ana Montes, we’ve got to assume that a highly capable and motivated intelligence service would have succeeded in recruiting others as well.  They don’t have to recruit 100 people a day. 

If they recruit one person per year and run each of them for sixteen to twenty years, as they did with Ana Montes, you can see how the numbers add up.  Before long, they’ll have a large stable of agents right here in Washington who are providing them inside information from as many agencies as they care to penetrate.  All those people have to do is apply for jobs and provide their information to Cuba. 

It’s easy for me to imagine that there’s more than one Ana Montes among us today.  The information that they’re providing is being shared with other countries.  I don’t expect Cuba to launch an amphibious invasion of Miami Beach tomorrow.  I don’t think that’s where the danger lies.  The danger is that the information could be shared with Iran or wherever our fighting forces are today. 

The last chapter in the book is entitled Death of War Fighter.  It’s about Special Forces Sergeant Gregory Fronius, who died twenty years ago at an armed forces camp in El Salvador.  A couple weeks before that camp was overrun by Cuban-backed insurgents, Ana visited the camp on official business.  Her job was to assess the military capability of El Salvador armed forces.  Those were the guys Greg was training. 

She returned to Washington.  Back in those days, she was meeting with the Cubans quite often and sharing with them everything that she had learned.  Within a couple weeks, that camp was completely overrun in a devastating attach.  I believe that the total number of El Salvadoran armed forces soldiers that were killed exceeded 250.  The insurgents lost eight.  If any of you have a military background, you can appreciate how devastating that attack must have been.  Even at the time, we assumed that they had inside information to penetrate that camp, which had been built by the United States Army Special Forces. 

We don’t know if Ana provided actionable intelligence to the Cubans that enabled them to penetrate that camp and kill one of our Special Forces guys.  We don’t know that.  We can’t point the finger at her and say she is wholly responsible for this.  My view is that Ana stood on the wrong side of the fence during that attack.  She was a fully recruited Cuban agent at the time.  She was responsible for supporting that Green Beret and not opposing him.  It’s for that reason that I’ve donated the author’s royalties from the sale of the book to his children. 

Ana Montes was one of the most devastating spies in our history.  She was totally dedicated to the job.  That too is what differentiates Ana from other spies that you’ve heard about, others who would simply accept money in exchange for their information.  Ana never accepted a dime.  She never asked for a dime.  I think the Cubans were too smart to offer any money for her.  She was so highly motivated that she would have been offended by it.  She was completely dedicated to the job. 

She never removed hardcopy material from work.  She wasn’t dumb enough to do that.  She removed information in her head.  She was a very smart lady.  Every night, she would go home and simply document everything that she had learned during the day.  And when she would have her meeting with a Cuban intelligence officer, she would provide it to them.  She did that every day at work for sixteen years. 

As our top Cuban analyst, she knew an awful lot.  I don’t have to go into any specifics into the damage that occurred.  You can imagine the damage that occurred with her kind of access.  She gave them everything that she could.  I guess the point that I really wanted to make this morning is what we have to be concerned about is the possibility that there are additional Ana Monteses among us. 

The FBI agents with whom I worked on this case were terrific.  They did an absolutely outstanding job.  It’s just an amazing organization.  Unfortunately, I believer there are too few of them dedicated to this particular target.  It’s not their fault.  There are competing priorities out there, especially today.  I’m kind of hoping that Congress will release some additional funds so they can hire additional FBI agents just to dedicate against the Cuban target.  I have no high hopes that is actually going to happen, but I would like to see it.  That would be the goal. 

I guess with those comments, we’ll turn it over to questions.

Roger Noriega:  Great.  I will recognize the speakers.  Scott, you can answer questions from the podium if you prefer, or from the chair.  I have tons of questions on this subject and I’m sure many of you do too.  We all have Ana Montes stories.  I went to Cuba in 1998, during the Pope’s visit.  Ana Montes was there in Cuba as well. 

We did a day trip to Camaguey.  It was about a six or seven-hour drive.  In the middle of that trip, there’s a rest area where you can get lunch and things like that.  Here were five or six Americans, four in my party and two in hers, in the middle of nowhere in Cuba of all places, and they don’t join our table.  It was very strange to me.  She was always very standoffish.  I was very suspicious because whenever we would ask questions and try to get the intelligence community to form declarative sentences about anything related to Cuba, whenever she got involved, the edges were rounded off into a sphere and then it would burst like a bubble. 

How was Ana recruited and by whom?  Do you have suspicions that the people who spotted her are still working on behalf of the government of Cuba?

Scott Carmichael:  You’re asking questions I can’t answer.  Honestly, a lot of the information related to this case is very sensitive.  This book went through a security and policy review for two-and-a-half years before it was released.  They were looking at ever single word and there’s a lot that was left out as a consequence.  How was she recruited?  Only in general terms that I’ve already related.  They were aware of her views.  She was very vocal about her views toward U.S. government policy when she was a college student.  They learned about her views and simply asked her.  That’s it.  The details are truly not all that important. 

The question you might ask yourself is, well, does Cuba have eyes and ears in Washington, Miami, and New York?  Of course they do.  Could they become aware of others who share their views or are sympathetic toward their cause?  Of course.  When they become aware, will they approach them?  Yeah, you have to assume that.  They are highly motivated to do that.  They don’t have to use the old honey trap techniques, coercion, or blackmail.  When they come across somebody who is already leaning in their direction, all they have to do is tip them a little bit and they fall right over.

Roger Noriega:  Second question.  It was apparently well known within the DIA that Ana did not agree with our policy.  This isn’t just somebody who is off working on general Latin American policy.  The difficulty I had was finding somebody who agreed with it in the State Department.  But this is an intelligence analyst.  We’ve seen an awful lot of pontificating by the intelligence community about how good they are in presenting the facts.  When you raised the concern about her being a critic of the policy with other people around her, they were sort of indignant.  Ana does her job. 

What does it say about the culture that a critic of the U.S. policy in Cuba was allowed to rise to be the chief analyst on that very issue of Cuba?  If it makes it easier for you to answer the question, has this episode stirred any soul-searching about whether it wouldn’t be better to move these people off accounts when they don’t agree with the policy?

Scott Carmichael:  We were aware of her views from day one.  In its defense, the security office raised that issue immediately.  We were aware of it right away.  Ana is an American citizen.  She is entitled to hold views that are contradictory to those of others.  In fact, we even encourage that.  Her supervisors at the time did come to her defense. 

The amazing thing is though that she gave such a wonderful answer to the question.  She did it in 1986 when we first raised it with her.  She did it again in 1991, during the five-year update on her security clearance.  And she did again five years later.  I interviewed her in November, 1996.  That was one of the areas I wanted to test.  It wasn’t to see whether Ana’s views had changed any.  I didn’t think they had. 

The reason I even asked her that during an interview in 1996 to determine whether or not she would give me the same answer she had given the previous two times in the same order.  She did, and it just rolled off her tongue, which told me that she was prepared for that question.  Her answer was simply that as an American citizen, she is entitled to disagree with the U.S. government’s policy.  A lot of people do.  She could name a number of Congressmen who also disagreed with our policies toward Cuba, Nicaragua, or wherever.  But she had never done anything against the United States or to harm the United States.  That was essentially her answer. 

How do you argue against that?  In time, it became a bit of a battle between the security and her managers as to whether or not we should let this slide.  Her managers did weigh in rather heavily because Ana was a very productive employee for them.  Whether we should take those kinds of issues into account today -– well, we continue to raise our eyebrows occasionally and we do a make an issue of it when we find that sometimes people who are born in Iran are serving as analysts on Iranian accounts, for example.  That’s almost common nowadays in the intelligence community.  In the security office, we raise our eyebrows and look really closely at these people, but they are American citizens.  They’re entitled to hold certain views, even though they’re working in the intelligence community.  It just doesn’t matter.  We have to live with it.

Roger Noriega:  Thank you very much.  Yes, sir.  Please identify yourself or your organization, and wait for the microphone.

Male Voice:  Charles [indiscernible] University and former CIA.  I’m curious, how did she get through the polygraph?

Scott Carmichael:  Thant’s a great question.  Ana actually did some of her own research.  If you go online today and just enter the search terms “polygraph countermeasures,” you’ll get all the information you’ll ever want about the different techniques you can employ to defeat a polygraph exam.  She had the temerity to actually attempt it and she succeeded at it.

Male Voice:  I was curious about that because I went through that also.  I can’t fathom anyone getting past it.  There are professionals that run these things.  Inside agencies are much better than what you find outside.

Scott Carmichael:  And that tells you something about Ana Montes.  As I said, I interviewed her in November of 1996.  I spent a couple of hours with her covering several different issues.  She is very business-like, very sharp and assertive, and competent.  That was Ana.  That’s a very good point.  I try to make that point too when I talk about the polygraph. 

Doing your own research to learn some countermeasure technique is one thing.  But when you get in that room one-on-one with an examiner to actually try it in front of him is amazing.  That tells you something about Ana.  She did that and she was successful.  In 1994, she defeated the polygraph.  Let me just make this additional comment on that. 

As an investigator, I employ the polygraph all the time.  I’m very familiar with polygraph techniques and its limitations as well.  I have a lot of confidence in certain situations and in others maybe not.  It should tell you something that in 1996, when I first learned of some suspicions about Ana and that she had just recently passed our polygraph exam, I didn’t allow that to sway my decision making at all.  A few years later, when we went full bore against Ana, we were already aware of the fact that she had successfully completed a polygraph.  That didn’t stop us going after her.  I think the polygraph does have its use, but it’s not a be-all and end-all.

Frank Fletcher:  Frank Fletcher with STS.  I read an article that Ana Montes’ mother was a member of the Socialist Party of Cuba.  I don’t know if it’s true.  I know other people in the past and maybe even today have had difficulties because of the views, affiliations, or activities of a parent.  I’m wondering, was that known to DIA?  And why was she given access as an analyst?  I assume she was producing positive intelligence.  Why was she given special access to programs and other things of an operational nature?  She should have been interested in what Cuban was doing, not what we were doing to Cuba.

Scott Carmichael:  We were not aware at the time Ana was hired of her mother’s views.  I don’t know that would have impacted our decision making in any way regardless.  I don’t recall when I learned about that.  It was sometime during the course of the investigation itself.  Would her mother’s views have influenced Ana?  Well, yeah.  She’s a child.  Would that have pushed her into actually committing espionage?  No, I don’t believe so.

[Question:  Inaudible male voice]

Scott Carmichael:  I guess what I had heard was that her mother was a socialist.  I hadn’t heard that she was a member of a particular party before.  This is the first I’ve heard of it.  I don’t know if it’s accurate.  That would have been of great interest to us back then.  And your other question?

[Question: Inaudible male voice]

Scott Carmichael:  The intelligence community uses a lot of special collection techniques to collect information about other countries’ activities.  Some of them are so sensitive that they become special access programs.  Our analysts are given access to the intelligence take from those efforts.  If she was made aware that the United States government was collecting information about Cuba using this particular technique, and people can’t even imagine that we would have this capability, she would be generally aware of what that effort was and how it worked; more importantly, she would be given access to the intelligence take. 

By revealing all of that to Cuba, not only would she degrade our collection capability against Cuba, but if Cuba were to share that information with other countries then our intelligence take against other countries could actually be defeated.  If they learn we’re monitoring a particular telephone line, well, then they can say whatever they like over that line and deceive us if they like.  The damage can be extensive when a sensitive program like that is compromised.

Larry Tracy:  Larry Tracy, retired Army Colonel and formerly DIA, in the pre-Montes period I would point out.  I was speaking yesterday to an old friend of mine.  You might know him by name, Colonel Jim Bosch.  Jim was the DIO for Latin America when she was working there.  He later took over the attaché program.  Before that, he had been a Defense attaché in El Salvador in 1980-1981.  He recounted one conversation, and this sort of augments what Roger had asked. 

Only retrospect did it really come true.  She stopped him in the hall one day and became very emotional about why we were supporting El Salvador, which was an army full of murderers and criminals.  He said that she became so emotional that he started to think that maybe she should move out of that job because she wasn’t objective.  He also thought it was rather humorous that she took her U.S. TDY per diem trips to Cuba, probably to meet her case officer at that point.  He had no inkling of it, she covered herself so well.  As you pointed out, he knew very well that she was very opposed to U.S. policy in Latin America.

Scott Carmichael:  Well, this speaks again to Ana’s productivity as an analyst.  Her management just absolutely loved her.  In the book, I quote her immediate supervisor to the effect that Ana produced three to four times as much product as your average analyst.  I put that in the book.  What he told me privately was that it was actually many times more than that.  Ana was such a super productive worker.  He didn’t want to say ten times because he was afraid of the effect it might have on the moral of the other analysts who were still there. 

Ana was amazing.  When you’ve got a great worker, you’re going to defend her regardless of things that worker may say or do, or what others may say about that person.  A lot of people have gone back now with 20/20 hindsight and looked at Ana.  Some people have even said, “I told you so” or “I knew it!”  I’ve even come across one of our senior analysts who actually told somebody else not to deal with Ana.  She’s a spy.  That was back in the 1996 time frame. 

I’ve got it from both of those analysts.  I don’t know if there were people who truly believed in their guts that Ana was a spy, but they were certainly aware of her views.  That didn’t stop her.  Aside from that, Ana was very careful to maintain a low profile.  She learned on not to have political discussions if she could avoid them.  She knew herself and she was afraid to draw that kind of attention to herself.  She made a conscious decision back in about 1986 to just avoid those kinds of conversations.  That’s one of the reasons why she appeared to be standoffish.  She just didn’t want to get into it.

Male Voice:  Thank you.  Antonio Rodriguez, Agence France Press.  You mentioned that Cuban has historically shared its intelligence with other countries.  You cited China, Iran, and Russia.  Can you go into any more detail about what sort of historic activity that has involved, how high up the intelligence gone, or what its nature might be?

Scott Carmichael:  This is nothing unusual.  Every country on Earth tries to surround itself with friends who develop coalitions.  When we do that, we share information.  Every government does that.  Cuba is not unique in that regard.  We’re reaching a little bit by making some assumptions that information that Cuba derives from its agents among us here in D.C. is then shared with other countries.  I’m going to say we have any specific information that verifies that.

Roger Noriega:  I’ll just add there has been public discussion of this information sharing.  The Cubans are unique in one very extraordinarily important sense.  That is the presence of the Lourdes intelligence facility, which gave it a terrific amount of access to material from the United States and its proximity to the United States.

Scott Carmichael:  One thing is that Cuba came to the table with in any relationship that it’s got is information.  What else is Cuba going to bring to the table?  Why are other countries so interested in aligning themselves with Cuba?  Because they know.  In May of 2001, he made a trip overseas to visit Syria, Libya, and Iran.  Some people have characterized that trip as an effort to build an anti-America coalition.  He had to build a coalition to defend himself.  While he was in Iran, he made a statement to the effect that working together Iran and Cuba could bring America to her knees.  What is it that Cuba could bring to the table?  Cuba has information.

Fred Fleitz:  Fred Fleitz, I’m with the House Intelligence Committee staff.  I was with CIA for many years and I know how hard it is to get published as a current employee.  I want to congratulate you for sticking to your guns and getting something out. 

I have a question for you and Dr. Bailey, who is a friend of mine.  I was involved in a rather lengthy debate with the National Intelligence Council over National Intelligence Estimates that Montes helped write.  Some of them dealt with the possibility that Cuba had a biological weapons program.  I was just astonished that the National Intelligence Council didn’t recall any of the estimates that she contributed to.  It was just stunning.  They didn’t even want to discuss it.  They didn’t seem to think she was a problem. 

I’m interested in your views and Dr. Bailey’s views on why the estimates that she helped write not withdrawn by the intelligence community?  What should be done now to counteract the effect she’s had on our nation’s analysis of Cuba?

Scott Carmichael:  Let’s see how I can answer you.  I have to be careful about what I say.  I don’t know why they wouldn’t acknowledge that.  After Ana was arrested, the intelligence was supposed to go back and reassess every single judgment that it had made regarding Cuba and Latin America, anything that Ana had touched.  I would assume that effort has been made.  I don’t know.  I wasn’t involved in it. 

With regards to biological warfare, I can recount a conversation I had with one of our analysts back in 1994.  Some information may have come out about Cuba’s biological warfare efforts.  The analyst had drafted for publication.  When you draft something for publication in the intelligence community, you coordinate it first internally within your own agencies and then it goes out to other agencies to see if anybody strong objects.  Perhaps they have some additional information that they could put into the process. 

This particular analyst had written that and Ana objected so strongly to it that she had actually “spiked” it.  That’s the kind of power that she had.  She just absolutely refused to coordinate on it, called up the analyst and the analyst’s boss, and said this is not going to go through.  That’s the way it was.  The boss backed down.  Why?  Because it was Ana Montes, the Queen of Cuba.  If we’ve got some information on this particular issue, we’d better sit back and collect more information for a longer period of time until we’ve got our ducks lined up in a row because Ana is going to come after us again, and she is always prepared.  That’s how Ana was so effective with our views and judgments regarding Cuba.  She was able to do that. 

During Ana’s last year with DIA, she had been selected as the first DIA employee to participate in the National Intelligence Council’s fellowship program.  She was the very first DIA analyst to become a NIC Fellow.  When you take your very first analyst ever and send her up to the NIC, you’re pretty careful about whom you’re going to send.  You don’t want to mess that up.  You want to set the bar kind of high for the next person as well.  They scrubbed it and scrubbed it and Ana was the one selected for that position.  That’s how good she was. 

During that entire year when she was under investigation, it was unusual.  Ana would pick up the phone and call the National Intelligence office for Latin America and have a first-name conversation.  “Hey Fulton, this is Ana.  How’s it going?”  Ana Montes operated at those levels.  She wasn’t just some little analyst stuck in a little cubicle reading the newspaper every day. 

Ana operated at the national level and people knew her.  I believe she was able to influence their views.  She was certainly able to influence the intelligence product that our agency was putting out, particularly regarding Cuba.  There’s a human dynamic to the business.  If she’s a power, you don’t confront that power unless you know you’re going to win.  With Ana, she was always so prepared that you were pretty sure that you were going to lose.  That’s the kind of power that she wielded.

Female Voice:  [Indiscernible].  I was wondering if internally the DIA took new measures to identify suspicious people inside the agency after Ana was arrested?

Scott Carmichael:  Yeah, they doubled my work hours.  That’s what I do.  I was hired by DIA in 1988.  We formed a unit that was dedicated solely to looking for spies within the agency.  That’s all I do, and there are a number of others who do that as well.  Have you changed any of our procedures?  Not really.  We found that, aside from polygraph results, our procedures didn’t fail us much.  The entire system is designed to eventually identify these people.  We succeeded in that effort, but the procedures we had in place then are pretty much the same as the procedures that we have today. 

We’re constantly looking at our own employees.  We don’t just hire somebody and let them run for twenty years.  Anybody who has worked at CIA knows that.  We’re always reviewing our own employees, looking at their foreign travel and contacts, their finances, everything.  In Ana’s case, she maintained such a low profile.  She never committed a security infraction, nothing that she was cited for.  She was very frugal in her spending habits.  She didn’t throw money around.  She was never in debt.  She paid off her debts.  She never brought attention to herself, and in that manner, maintained a very low profile. 

Guys like me are primarily looking for the people who are having problems because they are the most vulnerable.  If I’ve got an employee who is a model employee, I’m not going to spend a lot of time looking at that person.  That’s what Ana did.  I’ve changed those habits in the last few years, but that’s the way we were trained.  Ana knew that and the Cubans certainly knew that.  Our procedures remain pretty much the same today.

Ken Timmerman:  Ken Timmerman from NewsMax.  I’ve read your book, by the way, and it is in fact a very interesting case study that you’ve put forward and very disturbing.  If the FBI were to pull apart Ana Montes’ network and her contacts, how would an effort to investigate someone like Fulton Armstrong or certain Congressional staffers who seemed very supportive of her, how would that effort be received by the FBI and the counterintelligence community?  There are people in Congress, including members of the United States Senate, who have gone to the mat for her, and who believe that our policy against Cuba is dead wrong.

Scott Carmichael:  Are you asking whether the FBI might balk at investigating a senior person?  I can’t speak for the FBI, but I’ve worked with them directly for decades.  I’ll try to speak of them if I can.  They don’t balk at anything.  FBI agents in this business -– here’s what counterintelligence guys are like.  They’re very akin to submarine commanders.  Submarine commanders out in the ocean only see two types of vessels out there, even though there may be many types of vessels on the ocean.  There are other submarines and there are targets.  The FBI is kind of like that in the espionage business. 

You’re either investigating or you’re a potential target.  It doesn’t matter if you’re an aircraft carrier or a rowboat.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re the DIO, the NIO, the secretary of any agency or if you were hired yesterday.  It just doesn’t matter.  They’re not investigating people; they’re investigating the issue and trying to resolve it.  My experience with them has been that they don’t balk.  There is no political decision making there.  Do we really want to go to talk to this Congressional aide?  I’ve never heard of any FBI agent factor that into any kind of decision making at all. 

The real question is, do they have any basis or foundation for the suspicion?  Then they work to resolve it.  It doesn’t matter who they’re looking at.  Aircraft carrier or rowboat, it doesn’t matter.

Dan Medigovich:  Sir, my name is Dan Medigovich.  In the early 1980s, I was the Commandant of the Inter-American Air Forces Academy.  We always knew people going into El Salvador.  We’d always give them a heads-up because we had a number of our people in there assisting them.  There was a lieutenant commander Naval Seal that was blown away by a chica.  One of the things we tell them is to go in there, keep your down, don’t get involved with the chicas.  Did this lady help blow this guy away?

Scott Carmichael:  No, I believe that occurred in 1983.  Ana came onboard in September, 1985.  Back then, she was a grad student.  The answer is no.

Roger Noriega:  We’ll take one more question, or a couple more questions from the audience.

Bob Dubman:  Bob Dubman; I’m with the USDA Economic Research Service.  Where is Ana Montes today?  And is she cooperating with your investigation?

Scott Carmichael:  Ana was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.  She’s in a federal facility just southwest of Ft. Worth, Texas.  She’ll be there for twenty-five years.  She cut a plea agreement with the Department of Justice to serve a minimal amount of time in exchange for her cooperation.  That’s part of her plea agreement.  She’s got to answer questions and cooperate with the FBI for the next twenty-five years or more.  I’m sorry?

[Inaudible male voice]

Scott Carmichael:  I’m not involved in that process.  Well, let’s make something clear.  Ana operated alone.  She was very unusual in that regard as well.  Most spies, during the course of their espionage career, confide in one person at least.  It could be a spouse or a best friend, somebody else in their life who knows or strongly suspects what they are doing.  They hint at it and that sort of thing.  They just can’t keep it to themselves.  If you look at all the spies who have been arrested since 1950, you’ll find that the vast majority of them have shared that information with other people.  It’s just human nature. 

Ana was an exception.  She wasn’t working with anybody else.  She didn’t tell anybody at all.  She just kept it to herself.  That again speaks an awful to her self discipline.  She was just a remarkable person in that regard.  She worked alone.

[Question: Inaudible male voice]

Scott Carmichael:  I can’t speak to that.  I wasn’t involved in the FBI’s investigation down in Miami.

Roger Noriega:  Other questions?  I have one specific question and then we’ll stop.  We know that at least several members of the Wasp Network were aware of the Brothers to the Rescue trap, which resulted in the murder of four people.  They were aware of it ahead of time and one guy was actually convicted of murder because of his premeditated role in that.  Did Ana know it was going down?

Scott Carmichael:  I don’t believe so.  I don’t think so.

Roger Noriega:  I want to thank Scott Carmichael for his very interesting presentation.  I think he did a terrific job.  If you were sitting in my office and I walked in, I think it would be a very bad day for me.  No offense.  You or Dan Rather or 60 Minutes –-

Scott Carmichael:  I tell managers that if I show up at their door it’s not because I’m bringing good news.

Roger Noriega:  Right.  I will say this in transition to the next panelist, which you are welcome to stick around for.  I’m sure there will be some other questions that you want to comment on.  It shouldn’t fall to a coworker to rat somebody out as a spy.  At the very least, managers who see that somebody is an advocate or an opponent of our policy, should put them on agriculture issues or see what’s going on in Africa. 

I don’t know why in the Lord’s name they would feel compelled -– I know she’s an American citizen.  I’m not saying fire her or put a scarlet letter on her, but just move her.  Thanks very much, Scott.  We appreciate it very much.  We’re going to start our next panelist.  We’ve really brought together the perfect combination of people to give us insights on these issues. 

First off, I’m going it introduce them right before they speak.  We’ll have Paul go first and then Dr. Bailey.  Paul Crespo is an analyst, consultant, and commentator from Miami, Florida.  An adjunct fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., he teaches U.S. and world politics at the University of Miami.  A 2004 Journalism Fellow with the Phillips Foundation, Paul Crespo earlier was a member of the Miami Herald’s editorial board, where he also wrote a regular column.  He is also a former U.S. Marine Corps combat arms and intelligence officer.  He served in Europe, the Far East, and the United States in airborne, air assault, artillery, and special operations units.  He also served in the DIA for three years.  Paul, thank you very much for joining us.

Paul Crespo:  Ambassador Noriega asked me to talk about one aspect that probably isn’t covered very much and that is the broader aspect of how Ana Belen Montes fits into the intelligence community in general and the way Castro is viewed and perceived in the intelligence community and in another national security agency and what-not. 

I wanted to start by reading something here that I think will put the whole thing into perspective.  This is, apparently, an email that was sent by Steven Metz, who used to be the director of Strategic Studies at the Army War College.  He sent it to a guy named Ernesto Betancourt who used to be in charge of Radio Martí, our U.S. government broadcasting to Cuba.  Mr. Betancourt sent Steven Metz an email asking about possibly speaking on the topic of Cuba’s asymmetrical threat.  Metz responded in a way that surprised a lot of people. 

Among the things that he said:  he said, “I don’t see any evidence at this time that Castro is in any way threatening the United States.  I have long felt that the threat from Castro was overblown in American strategy.  Given the current world situation, I can’t think of any possible reason for Castro to provoke or attempt to injure the United States other than irrational hate.  I haven’t seen any indication of this during his rule.  I do not mean to deprecate the suffering of the Cuban people that Castro has brought nor suggest for a second that the United States should embrace him; I simply consider him an irritant who can do little harm to vital American national security interests outside of potentially supporting terrorism.  And I am not aware of any actions of this sort.”  That was Steven Metz responding to Ernesto Betancourt in email back, I think, in 2001 before 9/11. 

After a little bit of an exchange, he also said this.  He said, “I believe it is a travesty that U.S. policy toward Cuba has been hijacked by a small group bitter over their loss of privilege and property there in Cuba and taken in a direction inimical to the interests of most Americans.  The Cold War is over.”  That was Steven Metz, the director of the Strategic Studies at the Army War College.  To me, that is mind-boggling, and that is the kind of attitude that certain people have in the establishment.  He is the one preparing another generation of high-ranking officers and what-not and this is his view.  I think that’s dangerous if not outrageous. 

We have another gentleman who is Alberto Coll.  He was actually a friend of mine from Georgetown when he was a professor and I was a student there.  He ended up becoming Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for low-intensity conflict under the first Bush administration.  He gradually, after he left, that position started becoming more and more liberal or left-leaning in his point-of-view, very critical of the war recently, though that is not necessarily a big problem, but then he got caught going to Cuba illegally and apparently seeing a girlfriend or some family members and, of course, now he had his security clearance revoked. 

I’m sorry, he was teaching at the Naval War College when this happened to him, and it just happened last year, so he was going to Cuba for something that he shouldn’t have been going and he didn’t inform the U.S. government of it.  He had a clearance and he taught at the Naval War College and he has been increasingly moving leftward over the last few years.  I find that disturbing. 

We had a Cuban, Castro spy arrested at Florida International University last year, an agent of influence, not necessarily spying on the United States directly, but he was influencing people who were going to Cuba, possibly recruiting or identifying future targets for recruitment later among students and academics who were going to Cuba.  He was spying for Castro for thirty years and they just found him now.  He was a psychology professor and he didn’t have anything to do with Cuba, but he was participating. 

Of course, the Wasp Network that was uncovered in 1998:  10 spies came here illegally, penetrated.  They were Cuban military intelligence.  They penetrated Southern Command and a lot of other installations at a low level, but they were there getting basic reconnaissance, basic information, for possible future actions against these military bases.  The media downplayed that. 

I remember when I was watching it on CNN, they put that story right after colon cancer research and right before the sports at the end of their segment.  I think that’s the only time I ever heard of it, and that was the largest spy ring ever caught in the United States and definitely from Cuba.  Then of course, you have Ana Belen Montes, the crown jewel of the Cuban intelligence apparatus until now, until we find out that somebody else higher than her is involved. 

The point is that we have Castro’s spies being caught consistently for the last few years.  Illegal [indiscernible] military intelligence guy in Miami – oh, I’m sorry, I forgot Faget, who was the INS officer, supervisor level, and he had access to all the defectors who were coming to the United States from Cuba so he could inform the Castro government of who was going to defect, potentially high-ranking people. 

So you had someone in INS, someone in academia, someone in the Pentagon at the highest level, a group of military intelligence guys penetrating the U.S. and going to military bases, and then these professors at Army War College and Naval War College saying that Castro is not a threat and that Cuban-Americans in Miami are the real problem. 

That’s the problem.  I think for years people have ignored Castro, downplayed Castro, worked diligently to try and say that Castro is not really a threat, Castro is not a problem.  Maybe a part of it is Castro’s romantic appeal or whatever it might be, the reason that maybe Ana Belen was ensnared in all this or recruited for all this, but the problem is that there is a big infrastructure of Castro supporters or at least Castro sympathizers or Castro apologists that would constantly downplay. 

The last part I want to mention is the media.  I worked at the Herald for a little time and I remember anytime any of these guys get caught, the Miami Herald is the first one to jump in and say, well, it’s not that bad.  Oh, that’s [indiscernible]; they were a bunch of bunglers and they were outdated technology and they were a bunch of low-level guys.  This Faget guy, well, he wasn’t really doing anything.  The FIU profession, well, he wasn’t really recruiting.  I’m constantly sending him letters and emails saying, why is it that all you do is whenever a Cuban spy is caught you downplay the issue, don’t cover it, or say that it really isn’t that big of a deal? 

So you have, what I think, are Castro agents of influence, which we have discovered several of them, and as Scott would say, there’s a lot more out there that we can imagine are out there.  I think they work to infiltrate the Army War College, the Naval War College.  I’m not saying that Metz is one of them or anything like that – I think that maybe he is just very confused – but they are agents of influence.  They go to the media and they penetrate the Miami Herald.  Castro’s been in there for 45 or 48 years, and I can guarantee you he has found ways to get people in the Miami Herald or the El Nuevo Herald, which is a lot easier because it is Spanish-speaking – or other media outlets, which I participate a lot in. 

And I know recent Cuban arrivals end up getting producer positions and on-air positions at these Hispanic media outlets in Miami, a few months before they were working for Granma, the Cuban communist state propaganda for [indiscernible] Cuba.  There is one, as a matter of fact, who is working at the El Nuevo Herald as a copy editor, and she was a high-ranking propagandist for Castro six months before she came here.  Now she’s working at the El Nuevo Herald. 

I think that’s part of the problem.  You have all of these support structure, all these sympathizers and apologists, so sometimes Ana Belen is a little hard to catch because there are these people around here like – I don’t want to drop a name, but he already did – Fulton Armstrong, who I have run into once or twice and always struck me as a little bit odd in terms of his points of view.  He is often in Europe somewhere, I believe, now. 

The last person I want to mention is General Sheehan, a fellow Marine and a four-star general in charge of Atlantic command.  He goes to Cuba, comes back, and says what a great guy Castro is:  “I spoke to him for several hours and I was really impressed by him, and I think we can do business.  I’m really against the embargo” and blah, blah, blah.  This is a four-star Marine Corps general that was formerly in charge of the command that dealt with Cuba.  He is going to Cuba and saying that Castro is not a bad guy and we can talk to him and we can do business.  This wasn’t that long ago –- just a couple of years back. 

The biggest problem that I see is that there is this broad network of people that will either cover for Castro, downplay the threat, or support him or defend him in some ways.  I think that makes it a lot harder to, when you finally identify someone who is a real threat or a real spy, it is hard to say, because you think maybe he is just one of these sympathizers; maybe he is just a friend of Castro; maybe he is just confused. 

Like Timmerman said back there, I don’t know.  There is a fine line between being a sympathizer and being an idiot and being a spy.  Sometimes they overlap and it’s hard to identify the ones that are actually spies.  In my opinion, sometimes those sympathizers and apologists and useful idiots can do as much damage as the actual spies can by really softening up public opinion, softening up a lot of people in the intelligence community so they are not as alert to these threats, because they have already been sort of softened up. 

I think Ana Belen, one of her biggest dangers was that was exactly what she did; she softened up a lot of high-ranking people including, possibly, General Sheehan and types like him to sort of drop their guard and soften them up so that when issues come up, they are always sort of, “Oh well.  That’s not that bad.  That’s not that bad.” 

The last thing that I want to point out, and for public disclosure, my family is Cuban-American, so I am part of this in a more personal way.  But I think there is a strong Cuban-American attitude among certain sectors.  I think it maybe happened in World War II and maybe even from emigration of Eastern Europe – that if anything is said by the Cuban exile community or repeated by the U.S. government, it is automatically discredited.  Oh, he’s radical, crazy, Elian people, or whatever.  No matter what is said and then if the Bush administration repeats it, it’s like, well, they are in the pocket of an extreme right-wing mafia down in Miami and they are just repeating what these Cuban-Americans said in Miami. 

It’s very hard to get your message across because there is this bias, and you can see it in Mr. Metz, who, when he was pushed, finally came out and really basically attacked the Cuban exiles – they are just a bunch of people who want their property back and that is what this is all about.  I think that’s ridiculous and outrageous, but also very dangerous to the way we deal with the Castro threat.  That is my initial presentation.  I want to talk about a few more things, including his influence on Venezuela a little later.

Roger Noriega:  Thank you very much, Paul.  I think you’ve done an admirable job in a relatively short period of time putting this whole thing in context.  Dr. Norman Bailey is an adjunct professor of economic statecraft at the Institute of World Politics and senior fellow at the Potomac Foundation.  He serves on various boards of directors, editorial and advisory boards, and is vice chairman of the Americas Forum. 

Since 1984, Dr. Bailey has been an international economic consultant to governments, government agencies, corporations, banks, investment banking firms, trade associations, and trading companies on five continents.  Recently he served a stint in the director for national intelligence, focusing on Cuba and Venezuela.  Unfortunately for us and the cause of useful non-idiots, he is no longer there, but we are glad that he is here with us this morning.  Dr. Bailey?

Norman Bailey:  Thank you very much, Roger.  I am kind of interested that in that introduction you didn’t mention that I was on the staff of the National Security Council during the Reagan administration, but anyway.  I’m going to just make a few comments about several different topics in no particular order having to do with this subject.  I want to congratulate Mr. Carmichael for his book and his presentation and for making a major contribution through that. 

One comment has to do with is the question is constantly raised, why wasn’t Ana Montes discovered long before she was?  Mr. Carmichael addressed that question by saying, and quite correctly, that Ana Montes was a model spy.  She was a superb spy.  She lived like a nun.  She went to work and she went home.  She went to work; she went home.  That was pretty much it.  If you talk about Ames, Hanssen, Pollard, and some of the others who did immense damage to the United States, there were red flags all over the place.  If you have ever gone to a briefing about any of these people, you do wonder why weren’t they discovered long before they were discovered?  They spent much more money than could be justified their salaries.  They talked to people all over the place. 

It was really amazing that they were able to go on as long as they were spying for the Soviet Union, or in the case of Pollard for Israel, without being discovered.  It is not surprising that Ana Montes was not discovered earlier because she was, as I pointed out, a model spy.  Joseph Conrad in one of his lesser known novels called The Secret Agent, which is about an Austrian-Hungarian agent in London, spy.  His cover was that he ran a pornographic bookstore.  If you want to know how a really, really good spy operates, I suggest you read The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, which is also, of course, extremely well written. 

The second point was also briefly touched upon by Mr. Carmichael.  I think that we should make a bit more out of it.  The Cuban intelligence service is superb.  It is by far the best intelligence service in the Western Hemisphere on the subjects of interest to Cuba.  I very much include the United States in that when I say that it is the best.  It is much better than the United States’ intelligence effort on the areas of which Cuba is interested.  But it is not only that; that is a fairly well-known fact and was mentioned by Mr. Carmichael. 

The Cuban counterintelligence service is also very good.  So they are aware of what we are trying to do almost as much as they are aware of what we are doing.  That is also an extremely significant situation.  The Cuban government’s penetration of the Miami Cuban-American community is total.  Every important Cuban-American organization in South Florida is penetrated by the Cuban intelligence service.  That is significant.  It is significant because they know exactly what those people are doing.  They know why they are going to do things; they know how they are going to do things.  They know how much resources they have and everything else –- what their plans are.  That is very significant. 

The FBI counterintelligence does an excellent job and on that I agree completely with Mr. Carmichael.  The FBI counterintelligence service is entirely convinced that there are several other high-level Cuban agents in the U.S. government, not only in the intelligence community but in the policy community, and they are working on that.  I think over the next couple of years we are going to see some rather startling revelations in that regard. 

Alberto Coll was Dean of the Naval War College – he didn’t just teach there.  He was Dean of the Naval War College.  The amount of damage that Ana Montes did to our efforts in Cuba was huge.  This is something that people who talk about their books can’t go over everything that they have written in the book.  It is an area that Mr. Carmichael does cover in his book but he did not go into it in any extent in his presentation. 

Our human capability in Cuba at this point is practically zero, and that is human intelligence for those of you who aren’t familiar with the intelligence community jargon.  That is, to a large extent, due to the fact that our agents were all uncovered and unmasked by Ana Montes.  Equally significant, our intercept capability with reference to Cuba is also highly degraded because of what she knew about what we were doing and how we were doing it. 

And the Cuban government was able to take counter measures –- and has taken counter measures.  As a result, we are much less able to listen in to the communications of the Cuban government than we were at one time.  In fact, we are almost totally blanked out within the island.  When we intercept, it has to do with conversations that they are having with people outside Cuba.

Finally, I just want to say that, as an adjunct professor at the Institute of World Politics, I want to point out that Ana Montes was a student at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, which is undoubtedly a school for future spies.  Just joking, folks!  [laughter]  Consequently, go to the Institute of World Politics –- not the spy school.  I also didn’t know with reference to this gentleman here in the front row that Students for a Democratic Society still exists. 

Roger Noriega:  We’re going to take some questions, but let me just mention that when I was Secretary I didn’t spend a lot of my time going around town to see people, but I did make special trips to see Porter Goss and John Negroponte.  The purpose of my visits to their office – to Negroponte and to Goss – was to raise the Montes issue.  What is the damage assessment?  I will ask Norm and perhaps either one of you could comment on what you know about it.  Did you see a damage assessment, or did you have an impression that there were any of her projects pulled down? 

Quite frankly, they would have to start from scratch because she was so prolific, but it is remarkable to me that a major issue like the biological warfare issue, which was a mini-storm here in town –- which, by the way, helped spin John Bolton out of an ambassadorship.  You see how espionage and your agents of influence work.  It literally knocked Bolton out of it.  He would be Ambassador to the United Nations today if it were not for Ana Montes in my view.  That is rather remarkable.  Were any of her projects taken down?  Is it your impression, Norm?

Norman Bailey:  Well, not to the best of my knowledge, but I want to emphasize to the best of my knowledge.

Paul Crespo:  I want to mention that the Congressman down in Miami, [indiscernible] have been forcefully requesting that some sort of assessment be produced.  If it already has been produced, at least provide some kind of unclassified version.  But they’re not aware of one.  They’re very interested in it and trying to find more about at.  At the press conferences Scott Carmichael was involved in down in Miami and they stressed that.  Even the ones here in Washington, they pushed that issue too.  I think Scott might have something else to say on that.

Scott Carmichael:  There was a formal damage assessment.  It was completed quite some time ago and I had a chance to review it.  I didn’t retain it or anything like that.  The reassessment of all the judgments has not been incorporated into that damage assessment per se.  It was more of a broad overview of what she touched on and could have damaged.  I don’t believe that any of her products have been pulled per se.

Paul Crespo:  I just want to add that nothing being pulled is frightening and it’s so pervasive.  You have hundreds and hundreds of reports covering every aspect of Cuba and the Cuba threat, and they’ve been disseminated and used as source material for other reports.  They just keep proliferating.  That’s all out there.  It’s very hard for anyone to look at Cuba and not get something that was somehow touched by Ana Belen Montes in the last fifteen years.  Even if her stuff pulled, there are derivatives of that all over the intelligence community.  Some of declassified, but they’re everywhere.  The damage is unfathomable.

Roger Noriega:  If you’re a military officer and you’re minding your own business and not an expert on Cuba, and you know the DIA is very good at what they do, you have to rely on judgments.  You don’t know that you’ve been fed a line.  You don’t know that you’ve been fed Castro’s lines on whether he is or isn’t a threat.  Even in terms of the shaping of U.S. Policy, is Castro a threat? 

There was a request by Senator Bob Graham for a judgment on that issue.  It was controversial because a lot of the people who support our policy were certain they would turn a tricky conclusion.  Little did we know that Castro’s spy was going to be writing that report.  I’m not Cuban-American by the way, I’m Mexican-American, but I’ve been called worse things.  If we said that Castro’s spy is writing that report, they would have said we were lunatics.  That wouldn’t have been evidence of our being lunatics, although there might have been other bits of evidence.  Are there other questions?

Pablo Bachelet:  Yes, hi.  I’m Pablo Bachelet from the Miami Herald.  I’m not a Cuban-American, by the way [laughter].  If you guys could forward a little bit, how is the defense establishment looking to deal with Cuba going ahead?  I know it’s always been a very difficult issue inside the Administration.  I understand that people within the defense establishment look for some kind of contacts with the Cuban government.  They think that would be constructive, especially now.  What are your thoughts on that?  Given the situation in Cuba, should the Department of Defense have more leeway?  And how will the Ana Belen Montes case play into that?

Norman Bailey:  I can address that from one standpoint.  There was been a request by the Defense Department for a long time to permit U.S. military attachés in third countries to become friendly with Cuban military attachés and try to get information.  As a result, that request was months ago and approval of that has been blocked by another high agency of the U.S. government, which will remain nameless.  At one time, there was a swamp where it exists now. 

Paul Crespo:  I’m not necessarily sure that I agree with the idea of a military attaché dealing with Cubans.  I was in the military.  I was in Bosnia, Croatia, and a cutter in the Gulf.  I was a reserve attaché so they kept sending me different places for two months at a time.  I was in Venezuela as my last posting in Caracas in 1997, just before Chavez came to power. 

Considering how good the Cuban intelligence service is and how they’ve turned so many of our people and been able to run circles around us, I don’t know that it’s a good idea to have military attachés dealing with the Cuban intelligence people.  There is more of a chance that the Cubans would learn more about us than we would learn about them.  I’m a little ambivalent about that issue.  Ever since 1991 the issue that now things are changing and now Castro is different, the Soviet Union is no longer there and Castro is no longer a threat; well, Castro just lowered his head and his profile and kept doing a lot of the things he was doing.  As soon as he started getting Chavez’s help, then you see him raising his profile and getting more active. 

The thing I want to mention about Venezuela is that I went back as a consultant after I left the government in 1998.  I was with DIA from 1995 to 1998, during the period when Ana Belen was particularly active.  It’s very bothersome to me to know that maybe some of the stuff that I did ended up in Castro’s hands.  When Chavez came to power, Castro helped him and immediately started supplying agents and operatives to Venezuela, and actually started subverting the Venezuelan intelligence services right from the get-go. 

I remember talking to a couple of people down there that were former Venezuelan intelligence who had left within a year of Chavez coming to power.  He said that we spent our entire careers keeping Castro out of Venezuela and now we’re actually sending our stuff to Cuba.  I don’t know what’s going on here, but I can’t do this anymore.  He left, and of course, it’s just gone downhill since then.  Castro or Cuban intelligence is running Venezuelan intelligence and security services in many ways.  They’ve got agents from the Central Bank to the Ministry of Interior to the intelligence services and military intelligence.  They’re everywhere.  Chavez has mentioned that Cuba and Venezuela are one team.  In a lot of ways, the intelligence services are so integrated that it’s hard to which is which. 

Now we say that Castro may not be as much as a threat because he’s dying and there’s a change.  Every few years, there’s always a reason why Castro is not a threat and now we can talk to the regime.  I don’t see much of a change between Raul and Fidel Castro. 

There was an article I just read in the Miami Herald.  One of the points was that there was hope that Raul Castro would open up with the United States and whatever.  But since Bush hasn’t really maintained his hard line, it hasn’t happened.  It was worded a little more subtly, but that was the gist of it.  The United States is guilty of not opening up to Castro or Raul, even though would like to.  I haven’t seen Raul do anything except make a couple of comments to indicate that he’s willing to change and provide a reason for us to change our policies toward Cuba. 

I just want to remind people that this argument that was just presented was presented back in 1991.  It was part of the reason we got into so much because Castro didn’t change.  We assumed, the Soviet Union collapsed, let’s make overtures to Castro.  I don’t think now is any different from back in 1991.  Nothing has changed.

Roger Noriega:  Not only that, but the people who were saying that the Cold War is over are the same people who were during the Nixon administration were saying the Cold War is over and we should negotiate with Castro; it was the same people during the Nixon administration who were advocating we open up to Castro while the Cold War was in full-bloom.  They always come up with an excuse and the goal was always let’s loosen up the knot.  But Castro doesn’t change.  That’s the point.  There is no give. 

Raul hasn’t even made statements that he is going to change.  He has made statements about talking to us about our change.  It’s an interesting comment on that as well on the contact with the DATS, with the Cubans defense attachés.  I kill that idea more than once; I kill that idea when I was the secretary and I kill the bill when I was out on the Hill.  As [indiscernible] says, in government, no battle stage won.  And the reason that we killed it then, and this was being conjured up by political appointees in the Defense Department when I was there –- the Republicans, and the reason why was, look, our attachés are armed and indoctrinated and oriented by Ana Montes, because the products are still -– that’s what they are reading.  They are not a threat. 

Raul in the Defense Ministry is a frustrated reformer.  And all of that.  Plus we send our person who is disoriented by Montes’ misinformation up against the toughest nuts in the Cuban regime.  Those are people, incidentally, who don’t even talk to Eastern European militaries.  In the middle of the Cold War, the Cuban military wasn’t even allowed to exchange information in any kind of normal way with Soviet and East German allies, so the military –- the idea that anything useful is going to come out of that conversation I think is highly dubious.  We will take a couple more questions. 

Al Diaz:  Al Diaz, the spouse of a Foreign Service officer.  Good to see you, Paul.  Good to see you, Norman.  My question has to do with whether we are paying enough attention to the possibility of the Venezuelans spying on us.  We know for a fact that they are bedfellows with the Cubans.  They have money.  They have a lot of folks who are friendly to their policies in the U.S. and possibly in the government.  I would think that they present a greater threat now than before, and I wonder whether the U.S. government is paying enough attention to the possibility of the Venezuelans spying on the U.S.

Norman Bailey:  The matter wasn’t addressed because the subject of this session was Ana Montes, who had nothing particularly to do with Venezuela.  If you want to get into a discussion of Venezuelan anti-American activities, that would be another couple of hours and so forth.  It is obvious that the Venezuelans engage in all kinds of activities contrary to the interests of the United States, and that Venezuela represents a national security threat to the United States at this point.  Is the U.S. government reacting to this as strongly as I would like? 

The point of the answer is no.  I think that our policy toward Venezuela has been essentially passive, and I think that is a big mistake, but I don’t have time to go into my reasons.

Paul Crespo:  I want to point out that I think the U.S. government has taken a step in the right direction when they formed these intelligence managers at the National Intelligence Director’s Office, which specifically targeted Venezuela and Cuba.  That hadn’t been done before. 

I think that finally we are reaching the point or at least indicating that they would consider Chavez and Castro the threat that they are.  Again, I think that you are right:  Venezuela is a combination of the best of Cuba’s intelligence service and with the resources of only the Soviet Union had before right on our doorstep. 

I have written several articles about it.  Ever since I saw Chavez come to power, I have been -– It’s funny, because the stuff that some of us would know how this works and sort of predicting, Chavez is following that step by step.  For me, it was like watching a movie in slow motion that I have already seen before and I knew exactly where it was going, but unfortunately when I would mention that Chavez was a threat, I always got this, “Oh, yeah, yeah, whatever.”  A few years ago, “Oh, the Cuban-Americans in Miami are blowing that up,” or “oh, we hear that again; there is a Communist under every bed.” 

Well, no, they are not under every bed, but every now and then, you find one under a bed, and I think there is one of them.  The Chavez threat is huge because he inherited the infrastructure that Castro has all over Latin America and not to mention possibly in the United States, and they are working intimately together.  I think that needs to be focused on a lot more.  I think a lot of people, sort of the way the Soviet Union used Cuba and other third-party intelligence services have sort of lulled us into a false sense of security.  Well, these aren’t Soviet spies; they are somehow something else, and it makes us not worry as much about them. 

Maybe we aren’t going to worry as much about a Venezuelan spy as we might about a Castro spy or previously a Soviet spy or an Iranian or Iraqi spy.  I think it’s even more dangerous now because he’s got the entire Cuban system, the entire Cuban infrastructure that has been developed over 50 years, and he is belligerent and he is trying to push out beyond what people would imagine.

Norman Bailey:  I would go beyond that to say what somebody said earlier –- I forget who -– that Venezuelan intelligence and security services are now dominated by the Cubans.  They are actually running them.  That doesn’t mean that the person at the top is a Cuban.  It isn’t; it’s a Venezuelan.  But in terms of actual operational abilities, processes, and organization, it is basically a Cuban operation. 

The same thing is true of the Venezuelan army.  Every unit in the Venezuelan army of any size has a Cuban in it.  He is not identified, and since you can’t tell a Cuban from a Venezuelan by their accent because they both speak Caribbean rather than Spanish, the commander of the unit does not know.  He knows there is a Cuban there somewhere, but he doesn’t know which one it is.  They want him to know that there is one there so that he keeps his nose clean and so on and so forth, but the Cuban penetration in Venezuela at this point is close to complete.

Ken Timmerman:  Ken Timmerman from NewsMax.  I don’t want to go back and beat a dead horse, but I’m going to.  This idea that the intelligence products written by Ana Montes have not been pulled back, I find absolutely stunning -- incredible.  Could any of you give me an idea of who makes the decision not to pull back those intelligence products that were written by a Cuban spy, number one. 

Number two, Roger, could you perhaps comment on whether Tom Shannon might have some role in this now, who in what used to be the Clinton NSC and now is at the State Department? 

And Norman, I wonder if you could give us a brief description of the circumstances surrounding your departure from the office of the Director of National Intelligence?  There are three questions for you.

Norman Bailey:  In the first place, it doesn’t really answer your first question, but for a long time the national intelligence officer for the Western Hemisphere was a rather strange individual.  I won’t go beyond that.  Somebody mentioned him before so I will go ahead and mention him because then if anybody comes down and says I didn’t mention him -- Fulton Armstrong. 

Fulton was a really, really interesting person to be a high-ranking person in the individual apparatus of the United States.  Whether he had anything to do with not pulling Ana Montes’ reports and products, I really don’t know, but I would not at all be surprised to find out that he did.  As far as my departing the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and incidentally I don’t want to disillusion Paul, but the fact is that the office has practically disappeared at the present time.  There are one-and-a-half people there now.  When I say a half, I don’t mean somebody got caught off at the knees, but that he is a retired CIA officer and he is part-time and then there is one other full-time person.  The office has become almost entirely non-functional and nobody has been appointed to replace him. 

How did it happen?  I can tell you how it happened; I can’t tell you why it happened because nobody has ever explained that to me.  When John Negroponte went to the State Department and Admiral O’Connell took over at the ODNI, he fired me.  It is very simple.  Nobody ever explained to me why and he refused to see me.  That is really basically it. 

I’m not questioning his right to do that.  He had the authority to do that, and I assume he had reasons for doing that.  I do object strongly to the way it was done.  If you are going to come in and get rid of somebody, you owe that person a face-to-face meeting to explain why, and he would not do that, and no one else has explained to me why that was done.

Paul Crespo:  I wanted to mention -- I don’t mind dropping some names sometimes -- former Ambassador when I was in Venezuela, John Maisto.  I was very surprised when I was in Venezuela, actually after I left Venezuela and I heard him talk about it for the next year, to hear him say don’t worry about Chavez; it’s not what he says but what he does. 

I’m sorry.  No, no, no, he said, don’t worry about his rhetoric -- worry about what he does.  And I said, well, what if his rhetoric is right before he does something?  As we have seen, his rhetoric was pretty belligerent from the beginning and his deeds have caught up with his rhetoric, so I think Maisto was wrong from the beginning and I think he had a trajectory from before he was wrong about a lot of things dealing with the Communist threat.  Surprisingly, he went from Venezuela to the National Security Council. 

I’m sorry, he went to being the political advisor at Southern Command so he could influence more people in the infrastructure and in our command structure, and then he went from there to the National Security Council where he had his influence, and I don’t know; I’m not privy to the details, but I have heard people complain about his orientation when he was on the National Security Council before moving on to the OAS. 

I just wondered about his judgment.  When he made those comments, I thought that he clearly was not aware of the threat and wasn’t really focused on the possible danger that Chavez posed, and that set the tone at the very beginning for a very lackadaisical approach from the U.S. government toward Chavez that clearly wasn’t merited in retrospect.

Norman Bailey:  The interesting part of it is that it has never changed.  The U.S. government still has a lackadaisical attitude toward Chavez and John Maisto can’t be blamed for it, because he is completely out now.  He retired.

Roger Noriega:  Right.  By the way, I should note that John Maisto and Tom Shannon are very good friends of mine, John Maisto in particular.  I have a lot of respect for him.  Let’s see.  Is there somebody else who doesn’t have a--? 

[Question:  Inaudible voice]

Roger Noriega:  What can he do?  Look, I will tell you how I handled my concerns about the intelligence communities reporting on issues in my area, because I found an extraordinary pattern of grinding off the edges of anything that Chavez is doing, anything RSD [sounds like] is doing, anything Castro is doing, and anything for that matter that the FARC is doing.  I noticed this in the reporting and it was the product of Fulton Armstrong.  This was when I Ambassador to the OAS. 

I had encountered Fulton before when he was in the Clinton NSC.  My view was that he had become too much of an advocate to do a credible job as an intelligence analyst.  I didn’t question his patriotism or any of that, but I did question his judgment.  Since the only thing he is really offering me as a policymaker is his judgment, I wasn’t interested in what he said. 

The way I handled this was I told my very able executive assistant to let it be known that I didn’t want to see a single scrap of paper on my desk that Fulton Armstrong had anything to do with.  He never came to my meetings.  The agency folks were welcome.  Anybody from the intelligence community were welcome, but policymaking meeting and policy coordinating meetings, I was not interested in the person who had such profound lack of judgment taking up my time, either reading his products or hearing the sound of his voice. 

That is how I dealt with it and that’s how Tom Shannon could deal with this.  If he were to say, look, you guys have got to reassure me that I am getting good information and if it is still a product that has been warmed in the saucer prepared by Ana Montes, I am not interested in it.  Go after it that way.  Go after it from a professional standpoint on what their product is and the credibility of their product. 

That’s how I would do it.  You can’t win any battles by making a coup de tat against some individual, particularly when they are in the intelligence community, because any time a political person questions the credibility of the intelligence person it buys them another six months in their job.  No one wants to be seen bowing to pressure, least of all from a political appointee.  And I will say that of a Democrat or Republican, Right or Left -- I have my suspicions.  I thought it was a mistake to frontally go after him because it just gave his bosses an excuse to keep him on board. 

My instincts on that were proven correct by the fact that Ana Montes was kept in her job notwithstanding the fact that she was an opponent of our policy.  I think a lot of this is kind of the twisted notion that she will give you a good read on the policy, because she is a critic and a skeptic.  No, she’s working for Castro.  She wasn’t even neutral.  Okay, we have one last question, sir, and then we will break.  Thank you.

Gilbert Ward:  My name is Gilbert Ward from Tennessee State University.  Since this was an act of treason Ana produced and she took a lesser sentence for her acts that she had done, how much truth do you think is from her information that she has given to the agency and what measures are taken to check that information she is leaking?

Roger Noriega:  This sounds like your question.

Scott Carmichael:  Well, it is my question, but then it isn’t either, because I’m not directly involved with the debriefing of Ana or continuing contacts with Ana on any issues, so I really can’t speak to her veracity or what measures might be taken to test that veracity.  The FBI is more directly involved in that.  I can’t speak for them in that.  We can only hope.  I know ordinarily in situations like this, if she provided a piece of information, we would make an effort to corroborate it in some fashion, and if you corroborate it then you couldn’t trust it.  It’s pretty much that simple.

Paul Crespo:  I would like to add a question.  Is there a provision in the plea agreement that if she doesn’t cooperate at some point, her sentence could be changed?

Scott Carmichael:  I think the agreement is broken.  So they would start all over [cross talk].  There would be another sentence. 

Roger Noriega:  The gentleman used the word “treason” at a time of war, which generally I think that involved a firing squad or something along those lines.  I shouldn’t say things like that.  I say things like that all the time, come to think of it.

Paul Crespo:  I don’t like the idea that she is only going to spend twenty-five years in prison.  I wish maybe she would have gone before a firing squad, but there is a benefit to not killing them or putting them in prison for life and not having them cooperate, because there is still the hope that you are going to get a lot more information out of them over an extended time. 

And as we have seen in Guantanamo, as much as people criticize it, people in those conditions for one, two, three, four years, at some point do break, or at least they start softening up to the point where they start providing valid information, even if they don’t do it at the beginning.  Ana Belen might not be doing it right away.  After about 10 years of being in prison and being constantly debriefed, she might provide more and more information, so I think it’s useful as much as it is distasteful to have them debrief and have a shorter sentence than actually hitting them with a hammer as soon as they get caught. 

The last thing I want to say about that is that a lot of these people that we don’t catch -- and if you are interested in this at all, I would recommend reading all of the paperwork that came out of these trials – from the lost network and whatever is declassified from these proceedings, because you will really learn a lot about what was going on that never gets in the media, unfortunately.  The papers don’t cover it.  I think the FBI said when they caught the lost network, there were potentially 300 agents.  I don’t know if they could corroborate it, but the FBI said that and no one ever really picked up on that. 

There’s a lot of information in these court proceedings on the spy networks, but oftentimes we prefer not to go out and arrest them.  We prefer to keep them out there and watch them and know what they are doing, who they are doing it with, and where they are going.  There may be some of these guys that we know who they are, we know where they are; we’re just not going to go out and arrest them.  The only reason, I think, that we got Ana Belen as quickly as we did was because of the 9/11 attacks and the threat that she posed that was really direct.  Otherwise, we probably would have kept watching her for a lot longer to see who she was in contact with and whatnot.  There are a lot of those folks out there that we probably have our eye on but we are not cracking down on them just yet.

Norman Bailey:  Incidentally, there is a general attitude that foreign intelligence services try to penetrate only lower-level people in intelligence agencies of the United States.  I would just point out names like Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss.  They are delighted to penetrate the policymakers of the United States and have in the past done so quite successfully.

Paul Crespo:  Because I think we found in a lot of reports in the KGB files after the fall that there were political people that were targeted.  They were said, these are potentially targets for Soviet penetration.  They were politicians of a very high level but they considered that their orientation and their demeanor and their attitude and their softness toward Communism maybe made them a potential threat.  Some of them may have been recruited.  Some of them may have not, but they were maybe approached somehow.  Soviet files show that there were a lot of high-ranking politicians in the United States that they considered viable targets. 

Norman Bailey:  They are also very interested in people who have influence -- not necessarily that they are going to get information from, but who will influence public opinion, elite opinion and so on and so forth, and that is why they are referred to as agents of influence.  That is equally important to them -- in some cases, a lot more important to them because it can change or modify the whole behavior of a country if you can accomplish that.

Roger Noriega:  I have lost complete control of these guys, which was predictable.  I wanted to mention one last thing.  There’s a lot of interesting parts in Scott’s book where they approach her and say, “You’re a spy.”  She says something along the lines of “I’m not, but I’ll give you the name of somebody who is.”  She gave a name.  I was always intrigued.  You’re probably not going to tell me who that name was, but it was probably the one honest person in the agency.  Why would she be ratting him or her out?  Scott, this is your one chance to name names.  These guys have gone at that with reckless abandon, but you haven’t named any names.

Scott Carmichael:  No, I haven’t.  I know exactly what you’re talking about.  She was trying to deflect my suspicion away from her by putting me on to somebody else.  We did have concerns about that other person, but it was not a DIA person.  She was almost successful, but I could see what she was trying to do so I got her back on track.

Roger Noriega:  Have you heard the name of that person here this morning?

Scott Carmichael:  Uh, no.

[laughter]

Roger Noriega:  I’m glad to hear that.  That means that person is in the clear.

Norman Bailey:  Roger, it probably has been noted that you said that person is probably the one honest person in the agency.

Roger Noriega:  Well, I shouldn’t say things like that.  I will observe that I have told friends of mine that history will record that the last government that the CIA tried to topple in the Western Hemisphere was George Bush’s [laughter].  I’m probably going to regret I said that.  With that, I want to thank our panelists.  This has been an extraordinarily interesting conversation.  I hope you’ve enjoyed it and gotten some insights. 

I would just say this is a story that bears repeating.  It is absolutely remarkable that three U.S. citizens and a lawful permanent resident were murdered by the Cuban regime at the same time Ana Montes was functioning.  She was in the middle of the Pentagon planning the response to that. 

One of her old professors, Wayne Smith, was at a rally last Friday on the [indiscernible] matter and saying “Free the Cuban five.”  This was one of her professors, right?  They have the temerity to not only spy on us with our own people, and then demand that we free their spies. 

It would be funny if it weren’t so extraordinarily deadly when the U.S. is at war.  It’s intriguing.  I hear this expression in that gentleman’s email.  The only thing that would lead Castro to do this would be irrational hate for the United States.  Well, that’s the very definition of Fidel Castro’s attitude toward the United States.  It’s out there for everyone to see.  That’s why I hope you will get the book, share the book, or better yet, ask them to buy the book.  Get the word out because the other shoe has not dropped on this story.  You’ll look back on this morning’s session and say we saw this coming. 

Thank you very much for coming here and we want to thank our panelists.

[Applause]

[End of audio] [End of transcript]