FBI: Cuban Intelligence Aggressively Recruiting Leftist American Academics As Spies, Influence Agents

Veteran national security reporter Bill Gertz offers a piece at the Washington Free Beacon on the FBI's report on Cuban intelligence recruitment of leftist American academics.

Cuba’s communist-led intelligence services are aggressively recruiting leftist American academics and university professors as spies and influence agents, according to an internal FBI report published this week.

Cuban intelligence services “have perfected the work of placing agents, that includes aggressively targeting U.S. universities under the assumption that a percentage of students will eventually move on to positions within the U.S. government that can provide access to information of use to the [Cuban intelligence service],” the five-page unclassified FBI report says. It notes that the Cubans “devote a significant amount of resources to targeting and exploiting U.S. academia.”

“Academia has been and remains a key target of foreign intelligence services, including the [Cuban intelligence service],” the report concludes.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://freebeacon.com/national-security/fbi-cuban-intelligence-aggressively-recruiting-leftist-american-academics-as-spies-influence-agents/

You can also read about Cuban intelligence's successful recruitment of a spy in my Philadelphia Inquirer review of True Believer: Inside the Investigation and capture of Ana Montes, Cuba's Master Spy via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/08/my-philadelphia-review-of-scott-w.html

New Revelations About Cuban Spy Ana Montes

Brian Latell, author of Castro's Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA, and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, offers new revelations about convicted Cuban spy Ava Montes in a piece for the Miami Herald.

For 16 years, Ana Belen Montes spied for Cuba from increasingly responsible positions at the Defense Intelligence Agency. If Havana has ever run a higher level or more valuable mole inside the American defense establishment, that has never been revealed.

When she was arrested in late September 2001, Montes was about the equivalent in rank of a colonel. She had access to sensitive compartmented intelligence. Strangely, for one so openly enamored of Fidel Castro, her superiors considered her one of the best Cuba analysts anywhere in government.
Despite the importance of her case, some of the most tantalizing questions about her spying have never been publicly answered.

Could the calamity of her treason have been avoided? What was learned about Cuban intelligence tradecraft? How was she discovered? And, of enduring concern, did she work with other American spies thus far undetected or not prosecuted?
    
Thanks to researcher Jeffrey Richelson and the National Security Archive, new light has finally been shed on the Montes case. Because of their efforts, a 180 page study completed by the Department of Defense Inspector General in 2005 has recently been declassified. It is heavily redacted; many pages, including the CIA’s extensive comments, blacked out. Yet, a quantity of surprising new details are now on the public record.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/08/02/4267428/new-revelations-about-cuban-spy.html

You can also read my Philadelphia Inquirer review of Scott Carmichael's book on Montes, called True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of  Ana Montes,Cuba's Master Spy via the below links:

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Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/08/02/4267428/new-revelations-about-cuban-spy.html#storylink=cpy

Ronald Kessler's Column: Cuba Rejected Lee Harvey Oswald's Overtures

Ronald Kessler, the veteran journalist, author of books on the CIA, the FBI and the Secret Service, and chief Washington correspondent for Newsmax.com, writes in his new column about Lee Harvey Oswald, the Kennedy assassination and the idea that Fidel Castro knew in advance that Oswald was going to assassinate the president.

Many people find it difficult to accept the idea that a man like John F. Kennedy could be assassinated by a single nut.

They feel that trivializes an admired leader and want to believe that a president like Kennedy must have been the target of powerful forces — the KGB, Fidel Castro, or the Mafia.

But as with most assassinations, the sad fact is that a deranged man, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed JFK.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Cuba-Russia-Oswald-Kennedy/2012/03/23/id/433679

You can also read an earlier post on Brian Latell's Castro's Secrets via the below link:

http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com/2012/03/kennedy-assassination-did-castro-know.html

Note: My interview with Ronald Kessler about his book , The Secrets of the FBI, appears in the current issue of Counterterrorism magazine. You can read the interview via the below links:

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http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/RonaldKesslerQASecretsFBI2.jpg

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