Reuters August 4, 2006
U.S. intelligence pondering post-Fidel Cuba
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fidel Castro's temporary departure from power has prompted the Bush administration to order a new intelligence assessment of Cuba's future, but experts say it is unlikely to yield many fresh insights.
Nearly 50 years after Castro first became a Cold War obsession for the CIA, current and former intelligence officials said Washington had no clear idea whether his brother Raul Castro could hold on to power after the communist leader's eventual death.
The problem, experts said, was that U.S. intelligence has had little success penetrating the upper echelons of Havana's political and military apparatus, despite repeated efforts to assassinate or topple Castro in the early years of his rule.
Following the surprise announcement on Monday night that Castro was temporarily handing power to his brother after stomach surgery, U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte ordered analysts to produce new studies advising policy-makers on a post-Fidel Castro era, the current and former officials said.
A Negroponte spokesman had no comment.
Some said U.S. intelligence probably had no independent means of determining Castro's health.
"It'll be hard for the CIA to assure the president that it knows exactly what's going to happen if Castro dies or is incapacitated. They're going to get second-hand, third-hand information," former CIA officer Robert Baer said.
"It's like Iraq in the 1990s: we just didn't know what the generals around Saddam were thinking," he added.
U.S. authorities have been able to glean intelligence from some Cuban defectors, including Alcibiades Hidalgo, Raul Castro's one-time chief of staff and former Cuban ambassador to the United Nations.
But even those successes underscore the indirect nature of American intelligence, which is said to have few direct avenues into Cuba's closely knit decision-making apparatus.
The U.S. economic embargo has long since ruled out any of the trade or commercial ties that have allowed intelligence operatives to plumb the inner machinations of other governments.
'SOVIET HIZBOLLAH'
During the Cold War, Cuba was viewed by Washington as an intolerable Soviet challenge to U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
"For a while there, Cuba was sort of the Soviet Hizbollah," said John Pike, intelligence expert at GlobalSecurity.org.
But Cuba has lost its strategic status since the fall of the Soviet Union and the launch of President George W. Bush's war on terrorism. Scarce intelligence resources have been reallocated to more important areas, including counterterrorism.
Nowadays, intelligence officials said a main regional danger posed by Cuba was as an adviser on counterintelligence and internal security matters to leftist governments in Venezuela and Bolivia.
The public history of U.S. intelligence in Cuba began with embarrassment in the 1960s over the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion and a mistaken assessment the Soviet Union was unlikely to deploy ballistic missiles on the island.
Using what intelligence officials describe as a ruthlessly efficient police apparatus, Cuba has succeeded in rounding up a number of U.S. agents and informers in the years since.
"There hasn't been a sustained history of good intelligence assets in Cuba," the former intelligence official said.
U.S. officials point to the case of Ana Belen Montes, a senior Cuba analyst for the Defence Intelligence Agency, as evidence of the counterintelligence threat Cuba still poses to the United States. She was convicted in 2002 of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Cubans.
© Copyright 2006, Reuters
