The FBI Smashed Cuba’s WASP Network 28 Years Ago.

The FBI Smashed Cuba’s WASP Network 28 Years Ago. 

It Was More Than Espionage.

They Infiltrated U.S. Bases and Helped Kill Four Americans. Then the FBI Caught Them.

Ten, not five, Cuban spies captured by FBI on 9/12/98

Twenty eight years ago today the FBI smashed Cuba’s WASP Network — the largest Cuban spy ring ever caught on U.S. soil. They weren’t “heroes.” They infiltrated U.S. military bases, planned to assassinate a CIA officer with a mail bomb.

These spies provided information that helped Castro’s MiGs murder four Americans flying an unarmed humanitarian mission: Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales. 

Gerardo Hernández, the spymaster, got two life sentences for conspiracy to murder these four men.

 

Cuban spy Juan Pablo Roque escaped.

JUAN PABLO ROQUE, an eleventh spy also charged and linked to the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shoot down, had already fled to Cuba, a day before Cuban MiGs launched missiles destroying the two planes, and killing the four humanitarians. Three others identified as John Does were also charged. Pablo Roque was also an FBI informant who gave false information to federal agents.

When the FBI raided their South Florida apartments, they seized nearly 1,000 encrypted computer disks. Prosecutors decoded more than 1,000 pages of communications. 

 

The messages showed the network gathering intelligence on U.S. military installations, sowing division among Cuban exiles, scouting places to store weapons and explosives — and planning “Operation Parallel”: a mail bomb, disguised as a book packed with plastic explosive, meant to kill a man in Florida they believed was a CIA agent. 

Four men murdered by Cuban government agents on February 24, 1996 while in international air space.

This was not passive observation. It was a terrorist infrastructure on American soil. Havana, under the Castro brothers, has long sought to cause harm to Americans.

 

In 2001, it was learned that a top official in the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, who had helped craft the U.S. government’s threat assessment of Cuba’s military capacity, had for her entire career been working for the Castro dictatorship, including running an influence operation against Brothers to the Rescue in the aftermath  of the shoot down. Her name was Ana Belen Montes.

 

In February 1996, Montes facilitated a meeting between U.S. government officials and retired U.S. Navy Adm. Eugene Carroll to relay recent Cuban threats, allowing the now-deceased Carroll—who had become a left-wing anti-military activist—to shape public opinion in favor of Cuba while negatively portraying the anti-Castro Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue.

U.S. counterintelligence officer Scott Carmichael wrote in his book “True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba’s Master Spy” that he believed that that was a “influence operation”—a covert attempt to influence public opinion.