TWO

ON FIDEL’S ORDERS

WHEN I BEGAN MEETING WITH FLORENTINO ASPILLAGA TWENTY years after his defection, he was sixty, a lean and taut long-distance runner and swimmer. Like so many Cubans, he is animated and broadly expressive, quick to laugh and volunteer deeply felt emotions. When pressed for details about his twenty-five-year career in Cuban intelligence, his description of meeting the CIA officer he had admired from a distance in Havana stoked strong emotions. Even deeper feelings flared as he told me about his flight to freedom with his young lover, Marta.

“Tiny,” as he was known to family and a few friends, conducted meetings all day on June 6, 1987, at Cuba Tecnica, the cover company he ran in Bratislava. His principal intelligence agents and informers, and the counterintelligence commissars who monitored the Cuban workers in local factories, gathered to report to him. He had summoned Marta from Ružomberok, the provincial industrial town in eastern Slovakia where she toiled in a textile plant. She had no idea what he was planning and brought nothing with her.

No one in Cuban intelligence had any idea either what Aspillaga intended to do that evening, though the more astute and suspicious might have wondered. Occasionally he had joked with colleagues about someday hurling himself into the clutches of the enemy: “I am going to go over the wall one of these days.” They were always amused, confident he was joking, just letting off steam. He was known for his brooding sense of the absurd. And in any event, he was Fidel’s most highly decorated counterintelligence officer. It was his responsibility to make sure they never contemplated defection.

Soon after his arrival in the Slovak capital the previous November, he had begun to plan his hegira to the CIA. His only previous postings outside of Cuba had been in Angola for about a year in the mid-1970s and briefly in Moscow, but Aspillaga had no chance to make a run to a place where he might find a CIA representative. Bratislava, which is on the Austrian border and only about fifty miles from Vienna and a large American embassy, would be easy to flee.

It had long been part of his plan that when he finally made his move, it would be on June 6, the anniversary of the founding of the Ministry of Interior. He had celebrated on that date in Havana many times with colleagues in the past, at least once or twice as part of a captive audience listening to cheerleading speeches by Fidel or the minister. Now, just as General del Pino’s defection had motivated Aspillaga, he wanted to inspire others who might follow. He wanted to goad and enrage Fidel.

“I was inspired to come on June 6. I wanted to get at Castro, to hurt morale.”¹

Tiny—the nickname is probably a variation on Tino, short for Florentino— rendezvoused with Marta in a downtown Bratislava park late in the afternoon. It was a few hours before dark, a warm Saturday evening. Happy strollers and families crowded the grounds, picnicking under shade trees and listening to the tinny music broadcast by state radio. Many Czechs and Slovaks were buoyed that spring with hopes for liberalizing political change. The first whiffs of the reforms that would soon buffet the Soviet Union and communist eastern Europe were stirring.

Fidel, worried about what those changes would mean for Cuba, was pressing ahead with what he euphemistically called the “Rectification” campaign. It might better have been labeled the “Never Here” crackdown. Castro’s responses to the liberalizing policies of glasnost and perestroika emanating from Moscow that were beginning to splinter Marxist societies were ideological rigidity and social conformity. The Soviet reforms were lunacy; they would lead to ruin. In self-defense, he adopted the intimidating new slogan: “Socialismo o Muerte,” Socialism or Death, shouting it with raised fist at the end of all his speeches. Billboards went up across the island proclaiming it.

Fidel was digging in, closing down micro-entrepreneurs he savagely condemned as “neo-capitalist exploiters.” By any measure, their crimes were paltry. One offender he publicly denounced for selling chocolates in Havana’s Lenin Park; another, an itinerant artist, was guilty of sketching caricatures of people for a few pesos; another collected odds and ends at the city dump and made costume jewelry to sell. They were criminal outsiders in Fidel’s view, exploiters and violators of the centrally planned economy. Aspillaga never told me that the Soviet and European communist reform movement influenced his decision to defect, but certainly it helped sharpen his hatred of the intransigent Castro.

As a guest worker, Marta’s Cuban passport had been confiscated and was kept in a safe at the DGI Center in Prague. This was a standard precaution to discourage defections. Aspillaga would have to smuggle her across the border into Austria, but he knew it would not be difficult. Madly in love with him, she was prepared to do whatever it was he had in mind.

Ignoring the Czechs and Slovaks enjoying the park, he removed the spare tire from the trunk of his official Cuban government car, a little green Mazda 202, and pierced a small breathing hole in the floor. Then he persuaded Marta to fold herself into the cramped space there and quickly closed her in. No one seemed to notice, or care.

The border is only a mile or so from where they started, and he knew the guards on both sides because he often traveled that way showing his diplomatic passport, one of three in different names and cover stories he carried that day. Smiling and joking with the Austrian guards, he was, as usual, waved through. Soon he stopped along the road to let Marta out. She assumed they were embarking on a secret intelligence mission. It was only then, with her seated at his side, that he explained his plan. He broke down and sobbed, begging her to marry him in America, where they would begin a new life together.

“We are going to the United States. You will go many years without seeing your family . . . and they will try to kill us.”

He choked up recounting the scene for me two decades later. He was correct that he would soon be targeted for assassination. She was not targeted.

Vienna was less than an hour from the border checkpoint, an easy drive on good roads. Once there, he parked the car, hailed a taxi, and handed the driver a sheet of paper on which he had earlier written the words “American Embassy.” But the embassy was dark on a Saturday evening, locked and unwelcoming behind a heavy, ornate iron gate. Aspillaga was not concerned. He knew that Marine guards would be on duty no matter when he arrived, just as he knew they patrolled at all hours at the American legation in Havana. Loitering with Marta near the main entrance, they were soon approached by a well-trained young Marine guard. Marta spoke some English. Aspillaga offered his passports, flashed a thick Cuban intelligence document he had stolen, and, with Marta’s help, did his best to hurriedly explain.

“I am a case officer from Cuban intelligence. I am an intelligence comandante.”

He had crossed his Rubicon. In those moments spent with the Marine he became what is known in American intelligence as a walk-in, in Cuba a voluntario (volunteer). Some bring secret intelligence documents with them to quickly establish their bona fides—literally, that they are acting in good faith, are who they claim to be, and have valuable information to share. Aspillaga arrived in Vienna with a sensitive numbered copy of the Ministry of Interior’s “Guidelines and Procedures of the General Directorate of Counterintelligence,” stamped “State Secret.” The duplicate he shared with me is not deeply revealing of Cuban tradecraft or intelligence priorities, but it served to establish his credentials. The stunning secrets he would soon share were all stored in his head.

Some walk-ins are turned away at the doors of foreign embassies when they arrive cold, without warning or sensitive documents. They might be provocateurs, charlatans, or impersonators. The fact that most are understandably nervous and agitated when they arrive does not help to allay those concerns. During the Cold War, the CIA and KGB were wary of such volunteers. In fact, occasionally both spurned genuine, high-level defectors who, later, after making second approaches and being accepted, provided critically valuable information. Vasily Mitrohkin and Oleg Penkovsky are the best-known examples from the Soviet side. Both volunteered to Americans but were not taken seriously at first.

The Cubans, in contrast, usually are less cautious when approached by strangers offering to help. Aspillaga told me that “Cuba is freer”; the philosophy generally is “You take what comes.” Exaggerating to make the point, he added, “If a million people come, we would handle the million people.” In countries all over the world, true believers in Fidel and his revolution have volunteered their services this way, literally knocking on the doors of Cuban embassies. John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was one of them.

With Castro’s encouragement, his intelligence officers have tended—to use a popular term of their own—to be electrico, or highly charged, on edge, assertive, daring. These are traits Fidel values. He expects the men and women who serve him in clandestine capacities to act audaciously, seizing the initiative, taking risks, pushing against the odds. Ironically, too, these characteristics help explain why there have been so many defectors from the senior ranks of Cuban intelligence.

Aspillaga was confident that what he said next to the Marine guard would hasten his acceptance. It could easily be checked out and confirmed. His bona fides would be verified. He told the young American that he wanted to meet with the CIA officer he had admired from a distance in Havana. He provided the man’s name and the European capital where he was then posted.

“Call this guy. He is in the CIA. Tell him I want to talk to him.”

Aspillaga had never met the officer, although each had handled the same double agent, known to the Cubans as “Francisco.” The American was Francisco’s CIA case officer; Aspillaga was his Cuban handler at the opposite end of the double cross. The two agents had peered at each other through the prism of the double they shared. Each learned personal and behavioral things about the other through Francisco. Aspillaga heard the American’s voice, surreptitiously recorded during clandestine meetings with Francisco. He had observed him many times in surveillance film and video. And they also worked two other doubles of lesser importance for opposing purposes.²

The American spoke Spanish fluently and with a Cuban accent. He easily melded with Latino and Cuban culture and, for Aspillaga, he was a role model more honorable and professional than any of his own colleagues. By observing him so closely, Tiny had grown oddly close to his opposite number.

He respected the CIA man’s skills, his integrity, and his family-oriented values. The man’s wife had impressed him too. She was like a stock car driver at the wheel of their car, jockeying and accelerating to evade Cuban surveillance. “Whooooosh,” is how Aspillaga described her driving skills to me, sweeping his right arm in a wide arc. The CIA officer was simpatico. The word means agreeable and pleasant, and when spoken by Cubans it often also symbolizes a verbal abrazo, or embrace, that expresses warm admiration. To call someone simpatico is one of the highest compliments gregarious Cubans can pay.

Aspillaga told me with awe that the American’s clandestine tradecraft skills were “possibly the best . . . in the entire world. . . . The Russians also said he was the best. I would read it in reports from the KGB.” In his memoir, Tiny wrote that his Agency counterpart “was the most dangerous official in terms of his clandestine capabilities and high intelligence that we would confront from any intelligence service.”

“Alpinista” was the secret code name Cuban intelligence assigned to the American. It means “mountaineer” or “Alpine mountain climber.” Clearly a measure of their respect for him, it also acknowledged his adventurous qualities. He was a master of disguise and evasion and therefore was especially difficult to track. It was known that he handled Francisco and the two other doubles with warmth, charm, and vitality. He behaved like a Cuban.

They also knew he was not skimming from the CIA salaries paid to the double agents he ran. Aspillaga was impressed with his honesty, knowing how lax his peers’ ethical standards were. The Cuban doubles were required to turn over all the money they received from the Agency to their government. They were told it would be spent on building new schools, that they would be benefactors of a better educational system. In reality, senior intelligence and Communist Party officials squandered most of these substantial sums on luxury purchases. Double agents who traveled abroad on missions were typically given shopping lists by their superiors for goods not available in Cuba.

The CIA officer was incorruptible. Soviet intelligence had once tried to recruit him. Aspillaga knew from reading KGB reports shared with the DGI that it had once enticed the officer into a tense showdown in a European country where a Soviet agent placed bags of money in front of him and made a crude recruitment pitch. Tiny recalled, “I don’t know how many millions of dollars it was.”

But the CIA officer remained calm and defiant. He told the KGB, “No. I don’t need your money. The only thing I want if I were to work for you is to be the prime minister of Russia.”

They were stunned. “What? Why would you, an American, want that? It’s crazy. What are you talking about?” He smiled sardonically and leaned forward toward the Soviet agents, his elbows on the table that separated them. “Well, that way I could change Russia and defeat the communist dictatorship.”

Both the Soviets and the Cubans declared him an impossible target for recruitment. Actually, by then the DGI had already concluded from what their double agents were reporting, and from their eavesdropping and surveillance, that he was not a good turncoat prospect. They were sure he had no exploitable vulnerabilities. The Cubans and Soviets admired his tenacity and dedication. In Cuban terms, he was too “ideological”—too opposed to communist dictatorships—to be of any use to them.

As Aspillaga recounted these memories to me during our third meeting, he became emotional. It was then that I began to appreciate how his main motive for choosing to join forces with the enemy CIA must have been his admiration for this exemplary American patriot. Switching sides had not been a strictly ideological decision after all for Aspillaga. And it had not been just to hurt Fidel. Tiny wanted to work not only with the Agency but specifically with the agent he so profoundly respected. His competitive mirror-image relationship with the CIA officer had been “very beautiful,” he confided. I thought that was a strange, heartfelt admission, especially coming from a hardened Cuban intelligence operative often honored by Fidel as one of his best. And then for emphasis, Aspillaga repeated the thought.

When the CIA man arrived at an American debriefing center in western Europe where the old nemesis he had never met was taken from Vienna, he was so perfectly disguised that Tiny did not recognize him.

“They hadn’t told me he was coming . . . he came transformed.”

After fifteen or twenty minutes of conversation, the American finally revealed himself. Aspillaga was astounded and delighted.

“And then we began to laugh. He was toying with me to see if I would recognize him.”

The rivals were suddenly now professional colleagues, playing on the same team. Aspillaga told me his respect for the CIA officer soared. They hugged in a tight Cuban-style abrazo.

There are stranger stories in the shrouded history of intelligence intrigue, but few, I imagine, with the poignancy of this one. Other important defectors during the Cold War, including other Cubans, also admired from a distance the opposing intelligence service they eventually joined. There are comparable stories in literature and military history. I am not aware, however, of any other case of a defection from any country that hinged on the professionalism and appeal of a single personality on the opposing side. The most important voluntario ever to abandon Cuban intelligence came to the CIA because of his boundless admiration for an adversary he had never met.

At the American debriefing center, officials could hardly believe the shocking secrets that immediately began to gush from their unexpected Cuban prize.

They listened with stomach-wrenching astonishment as he reported how thoroughly Cuban intelligence had manipulated and deceived the CIA on an unimaginably grand scale and for so many years. Beginning with those first American debriefers, and twenty years later with me, Aspillaga unveiled some of Fidel Castro’s most sensitive and incriminating secrets, always with a curious mixture of remorse and pride.

HE IS AN AMERICAN CITIZEN NOW, living quietly and obscurely with a new identity. Providing him that measure of protection after his debriefings by the CIA and FBI was the prudent thing to do. To this day, so long after his arrival in the United States, he still avoids publicity and the torrid polemics and posturing of Cuban exile politics. But even so, and exactly as he had feared from the start, he was targeted for assassination.

The first attempt—in London, on September 12, 1988—was the one that came closest to succeeding. Indeed, Aspillaga’s survival was nothing short of miraculous. He still has the tweed jacket he wore that day. He brought it to one of our meetings to show me the holes in its flanks from the bullets fired at him from close range by a former DGI colleague. He is certain that the order for his execution came directly from Fidel. Two other high-level Cuban defectors I interviewed have confirmed that to be true beyond any conceivable doubt.³

Juan Sanchez Crespo defected in 2008. He was a trusted member of Castro’s security detail from 1977 until 1994 and for a period functioned as chief of his advance team that completed risk assessments before Fidel’s international travels. Sanchez told me that “the man who shot at Aspillaga did so on Fidel’s orders.”

Another highly placed DGI defector shared details of the assassination attempt with me. He and Aspillaga had known each other and collaborated on sensitive operations. This erudite man also lives now as an American citizen with an assumed identity. But even that name will not be revealed here. He has asked for anonymity for his own protection and that of family members, so I will call him José Maragon.

“Fidel was personally involved in that assassination operation, managing and directing most details,” Maragon told me. “Fidel ordered the DGI leadership to contact the KGB in Havana and request a special assassination pistol. The Soviets had one at the embassy and gave it to us.” It was a Groza, or Thunderstorm, but incongruously named, because it was silent when fired.

A vertically aligned double-barreled derringer, small and snub-nosed, it fired high-speed 7.62 mm ammunition, the same as used in the powerful Kalashnikov rifle. The Groza was designed by the KGB for one purpose: to kill reliably and silently at close range, to carry out what were known as wet operations, or assassinations. The only sound the little pistol makes when fired is a soft click of the firing pin.

Describing the weapon to me, Maragon picked up a common fluted glass salt shaker from the restaurant table where we were meeting, enveloping it in his right hand. “The pistol is very small,” he said, “about like this.”

It was intended to be used by Miguel Medina Perez, a DGI officer assigned to the London embassy as third secretary. Aspillaga told me they had studied together in the DGI intelligence school and had remained friends. Aspillaga considered the baby-faced Medina a candidate ripe for a defection pitch, saying that his loyalty to Castro and the revolution was in doubt. When Aspillaga learned that his old friend was severely depressed that week in London—his stepson had just died in a drowning accident in Cuba—he thought it was even more likely he could persuade him to commit treason.

The two old colleagues met and drank together for four or five hours in a pub. They talked in rapid-fire Cuban Spanish until after midnight, joking and reminiscing. Medina gave Aspillaga every reason to believe he would also defect and finally agreed to do so a few days later at an arranged time and place. But he failed to show up.

In the meantime, he had confessed all to his DGI overseers. “I saw Aspillaga yesterday,” he told them. It had actually been a few days earlier, but Medina was desperately trying to protect himself for having met with such a notorious traitor. As penance, a revolutionary auto-da-fé, he was ordered to kill his old friend.

There had not been enough time, however, for the Groza Fidel had requested to reach London in the foreign ministry’s diplomatic pouch. So Medina was armed instead with a Makarov. For forty years this much larger and heavier weapon had been the standard-issue Soviet sidearm, which many Cuban military and intelligence officers also carried.

According to contemporary British and American press reports, CIA and Scotland Yard officers were posted in the streets the following Monday afternoon when Aspillaga approached Medina at his home in the fashionable Bayswater district. He would try again to persuade him to defect. Medina opened the door of his apartment and Tiny reached out toward him, to shake his hand.⁴

“Hey, Medina, como estas, how are you?” They were no more than five or six feet apart when Medina pulled the Makarov from a hidden holster and began firing, with no words or warning. Unlike the silent Groza, each discharge boomed like a clap of thunder.

But Medina was not a trained assassin. Sanchez Crespo told me that “the man who shot at Aspillaga on Fidel’s orders did not know how to use a gun. He was an intelligence bureaucrat, not trained in the use of firearms.”

Medina was in fact the indulged and neurotic nephew of one of the early heroes of Castro’s revolution; his post in London was a slacker’s sinecure. He had no experience with semiautomatic Makarovs or any handguns. Agitated and frightened, under duress to carry out his commander in chief’s orders, he fired erratically with one hand, the large pistol wavering and recoiling sharply with each shot.

Fidel, the harshest judge, gave every appearance of believing that it was an authentic murder attempt. He personally received Medina as a hero when he returned to Havana, awarding him a distinguished service medal and a car, an extravagant gift at a time when the Cuban economy was suffering from particularly severe shortages of nearly everything. Castro wanted it understood throughout the intelligence services that, successful or not, Medina had acted heroically, on orders from the top.⁵

Maragon doubts, however, that Fidel was truly convinced Medina had done his best to kill his friend. Always suspecting betrayal and conspiracy, Castro must have wondered if Medina had come close to defecting too. But as it happened so often in the revolution’s convoluted history, he needed to make the best of the situation, and thus the weakling he probably despised was briefly elevated to heroic status. Not surprisingly, Medina was never heard from again.

During our second meeting, the lithe and compact Tiny demonstrated for me how he had evaded five or six gunshots that day in London. He darted and jumped and danced in smooth, quick balletic leaps in the room where we were talking. Throughout that spontaneous performance he grinned triumphantly, re-enacting his lucky escape fifteen months after Fidel had imposed a death sentence on him. One shot in fact had grazed his right side; he remembers the searing heat. The leather belt he wore showed signs of having slightly deflected or absorbed that round.

There was another close call, in 1997, ten years after he defected. Fidel was still insisting that the death sentence be carried out. This attempt occurred late at night where Aspillaga was living with Marta, by then his wife, and their two children. Despite all the precautions, the DGI had managed to track him down. Its agents had been diligent and determined, taking advantage of a clerical error made in an American government agency outside of the intelligence community that eventually led them to Aspillaga’s hiding place.

He became suspicious after noticing strange men, who looked like young and fit Cubans, loitering near his home. One night soon after, long past midnight, he listened and watched for the intruders he sensed were coming as he sat on guard at his kitchen counter in total darkness. Marta and the children were asleep, barricaded in a bedroom. He heard a slight rustling outside.

Suddenly someone fired at him. He thought the sharp clap sounded like an AK-47 round. The shot was wild, striking an aluminum support pole of an awning near the window he was facing.

His luck had held again. The assassins, he believes, were trained DGI illegals, deep-cover agents living in the United States as American citizens with stolen or forged identities. He does not doubt that they were members of an underground network of Cuban agents, the Red Avispa, a sprawling Miami-based “Wasp” espionage complex that was shut down by the FBI one year later, in September 1998. Tiny had no choice but to relocate again with his family.

The second attempt and a third event, according to Aspillaga, were probably orchestrated in Havana by one of his most trusted old friends. They had worked together in intelligence and counterintelligence for twenty-four years. Known to colleagues by the pseudonym “Ricardo,” he was recalled as chief of the DGI Center in an African country as soon as his old colleague’s defection was confirmed.

“Ricardo” was selected to inflict Fidel’s revenge because he knew Aspillaga well and might be able to predict what his friend would do and how he might be found. He would have a good sense of Aspillaga’s vulnerabilities and peculiarities. He might even be able to ingratiate himself with Tiny’s first wife and daughter, left behind in Cuba, to elicit information that could lead to him. Aspillaga wrote about “Ricardo” in his unpublished memoir: “He was ordered to return to Cuba with the objective that he direct the group in charge of seeking me out, determining my location for the purpose of sending an assassin to kill me.”⁶

Tiny’s betrayal was also used for motivational leverage in the military’s training of commandos and snipers. Lazaro Betancourt, a muscular young member of Fidel’s personal security detail, defected through the American embassy in the Dominican Republic in 1999. He told me that he flew out of Santo Domingo on a commercial flight convincingly dressed as a decorated American Marine. Betancourt remembers his elite class of student sharpshooters being berated on the firing range by their military instructors: “Learn this well,” they were told, “so your shot won’t miss when you are assigned to kill Aspillaga.”⁷

Aspillaga was still being tracked by DGI bloodhounds and hunters. As long as Fidel was in power, he was determined to exact revenge. That may have changed when he was forced, following debilitating surgeries, to provisionally yield the presidency to his brother Raúl in July 2006, and to definitively step down in February 2008. Under Raúl Castro’s less vindictive leadership, the death sentence may have been annulled or simply forgotten. Aspillaga assumes, nevertheless, as he must, that he remains a marked man and will be in the Cuban government’s crosshairs until sometime after the Castro brothers and the communist regime have disappeared.

THROUGHOUT THE CIA AND FBI HIERARCHIES, there was never any doubt about Tiny’s reliability or the veracity of his revelations. One retired senior officer told me that Aspillaga’s “value as a defector was as good or better than any the CIA ever had anywhere. If he had been a Soviet, it would have been the best by far we had in our entire history.”

Aspillaga told me he was never polygraphed. “No. They trusted me. The value of what I provided was so extraordinary.”

Ironically, however, had he been connected to a lie detector machine and wanted to deceive his CIA handlers, he probably could have succeeded. The manuscript he shared with me devotes an entire chapter to the counterpolygraph training the DGI conducted in a safe house—a casa operativa—established exclusively for that purpose in a western Havana suburb. Aspillaga wrote that he had volunteered for the training because the double agents he handled were all routinely enrolled there so they could lie persuasively to CIA polygraphers.

“I wanted to feel for myself the sensations that the agents experience.”

With or without an American polygraph exam, defectors often are vetted and verified within hours of their first meetings with knowledgeable intelligence professionals. The fact that he was not a double agent or provocateur would have been established before Aspillaga was spirited out of Vienna.

Later, as he was slowly debriefed, any doubts counterintelligence worriers may have clung to were definitively dispelled. That was because when the CIA was running the agents it believed to be bona fide, some defensive plays had been made, ingenious double checks put in place that later confirmed without a shred of doubt that Aspillaga was a genuine, truthful defector. Those measures are still too sensitive to describe here.

Compounding the shock for the Cuban leadership, Aspillaga was not the only high-level traitor in 1987. Five other ranking military and intelligence officers also fled over several months. Juan Antonio Rodríguez Menier, an honored veteran of intelligence and counterintelligence since the first year of Castro’s regime, defected in February from his post as DGI Center chief in Budapest. Later in the year another DGI officer fled from his assignment in a South American capital. Aspillaga told me that two other DGI officers, a married couple, also exited that year, but they have remained silent in exile obscurity. And, as previously noted, Rafael del Pino flew to Florida shortly before Aspillaga departed. All were probably motivated at least in part by the reform movements blossoming in communist bloc nations and Castro’s unbending opposition to them.

Every one of the defections was a bitter personal blow to Fidel. As he saw it, they had all betrayed him, mocked and repudiated him by switching sides. At first his intention was to keep their treason secret so that only a few in Cuban intelligence and the military would be aware of them. Del Pino’s flight attracted heavy international media attention, however, so there was no keeping it under wraps. Before long both del Pino and Aspillaga were interviewed on radio broadcasts that could be heard on the island. Aspillaga appeared on the American government Radio Martí—a Voice of America news and entertainment outlet—and other Miami commercial stations. In their interviews, both men condemned and ridiculed the regime they had left behind.

The damage done collectively by the six defectors was so great, and the danger of recurrence so ominous, that Fidel could not remain silent. In a rambling four-hour speech on June 24, 1987, only a few weeks after Aspillaga reached the CIA, he fulminated about betrayal and treason, sounding like a cancer surgeon in the operating room identifying malignant tumors to remove.⁸

“There have been big and small traitors,” Fidel said. “I remember three big ones.” What distinguished those three from the “small traitors” was that they had all been close to him. They betrayed his trust, not simply communism or the revolution or the regime, but him personally. From his perspective, defections were not just damaging breaches of national security but vile personal affronts.

The first “big” traitor was a peasant named Eutimio Guerra, who had joined Fidel’s guerrilla movement in 1957 and turned into an informant for the old dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The hapless Eutimio was found out and summarily executed by Raúl Castro on Fidel’s orders. It was the second execution of a traitor, or suspected one, that Raúl carried out without question or remorse. In the Castros’ Cuba, summary execution on Fidel’s orders is all there is of due process for real and imagined offenders.⁹

In a strange believe-it-or-not twist, the other two “big” traitors Fidel railed against shared the exact same name: Rafael del Pino. It is not, incidentally, a commonplace Cuban name, like John Smith in the United States, and one wonders how any others remaining on the island with that name might have fared in the aftermath of Castro’s speech. The first del Pino, according to Fidel, betrayed him soon after the triumph of the revolution. He was imprisoned and died in his cell in Havana, supposedly a suicide. More likely he was poisoned or shot.

And there was the air force hero who Fidel berated in the “traitors” speech; he said the general had come from a bourgeois family and, despite valiant contributions, should never have been trusted as a true and reliable revolutionary. The general also now lives obscurely in the United States with a new identity, careful to avoid publicity that might leave him vulnerable to Cuban assassins. He has been targeted at least once on Fidel’s orders. During my meetings with him, he has never shown any fear and on a few occasions he has ventured out of his assumed identity to make appearances as himself. But he knows he is the only survivor of Fidel’s demonology of “big” traitors and exercises extreme caution.

It was clear to Fidel’s listeners in Cuban intelligence that he was also referring in his tirade to the spate of defections from its ranks. He has never mentioned Aspillaga’s name in public or referred to his defection, though Tiny was arguably the single most damaging defector from civilian, military, and intelligence careers in the more than half-century history of the Castro brothers’ regime. Above all, during his speech Fidel was intent on warning others in the clandestine services contemplating treason that the penalties would be severe. He said: “There will never be an excuse for a revolutionary to cross over to the side of the enemy. We can accept many other things, but not this one. . . . We cannot accept defection . . . the act of defecting while possessing secrets is very grave.”¹⁰

The warning was cautiously parsed. Fidel wanted it to be unmistakably threatening for domestic audiences but did not want to sound like a Stalinist to foreign listeners. Tiny told me that after his departure, he learned—presumably in phone conversations with former colleagues—that Fidel started requiring intelligence officers to sign a blood oath acknowledging they would automatically be sentenced to death—ajusticiado—if they were to defect. The speech was Fidel’s way of throwing down the gauntlet. The traitor Aspillaga’s execution was mandated; he would be made an example to any others who might be tempted to follow him.

Cumulatively, the damage done during Cuba’s “year of defectors” was so great that Fidel ordered a sweeping reorganization of the DGI, which was renamed the Directorate of Intelligence. Doubts about the loyalty of many officers intensified, and restructuring continued. It all led in the summer of 1989 to an even more devastating, top-to-bottom purging of the Ministry of Interior. The Castro brothers feared more high-level defections and possibly serious unrest within this bulwark of their regime, second in importance only to the military.

The Stalinist-style crackdown was preemptive, meant to snuff out every trace of support within the secret services for the liberalizing reforms that led in 1989 to the toppling of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the communist bloc. Arnaldo Ochoa, Cuba’s most decorated and beloved general, was executed on trumped-up charges of drug trafficking. Antonio de la Guardia, a swashbuckling intelligence colonel and a favorite role model for a younger generation of operatives, also faced a firing squad. Why? They had contemplated and perhaps had begun to plot defecting.

The men and women of Fidel’s secret vanguard always walked a dangerously fine line as they endeavored to please him. No matter how diligently they carried out his orders—even by achieving remarkable feats in his name—they could never know when they might suddenly fall from grace. José Abrahantes, the faithful minister of the interior when Aspillaga defected and at the time of the 1989 purges, was imprisoned that year and died soon after, ostensibly of a heart attack.

His deputy, Pascual Martínez Gil, a decorated and courageous DGI general, also learned how expendable he was despite his heroism in one of Fidel’s greatest victories. Ten years earlier, “Pascualito,” as Castro liked to refer to him when he was in favor, was the first man at the head of a commando unit that stormed the heavily fortified bunker of Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, who had fled shortly before. The purged Pascualito is said to be driving a taxi in Havana today.¹¹

The DGI went into convulsions and was put under the control of three-star general Abelardo Colomé Ibarra, Raúl Castro’s favorite crony. As was usually the case when the Castro brothers unleashed a purge, they had multiple motives. Many DGI officers earned the wrath of government counterparts because of their arrogance and ostentatiously high living standards. They were especially despised by military officers who lived more austerely, earning considerably less. The many easy intelligence successes before Aspillaga’s defection had bred institutional hubris. Like all Cuban government entities, the DGI was riddled with corruption. When the worst of the terror had passed, Fidel penned a long editorial in which he complained that the interior ministry had lacked an internal counterintelligence system and that the DGI had become too independent and powerful.¹²

There were many casualties of the purges, including by execution, demotion, banishment, suicide, and inexplicable sudden death. According to the defector Rodríguez Menier, nearly two hundred intelligence professionals were imprisoned. “Everyone I knew in the [ministry], without exception, has been executed, locked up, or retired from power.” Another defector, José Ramon Ponce, a psychologist with eighteen years’ experience in counterintelligence, says that “thousands” of officers were purged.¹³

Rodríguez Menier also observed that all of the imprisoned officers “were opposed to Castro and were almost to the point of conspiring to overthrow him.” They were the “most receptive to change,” the most intelligent and best-informed Cubans. He wrote that a coup against the Castro brothers may have been brewing in the intelligence community. Aspillaga also tells of pervading unrest that started within the DGI in 1983 and reached regime-threatening intensity six years later. Others wrote that many of those purged or executed, including General Ochoa, had been attracted to the reform movement then flowering in the Soviet bloc. It was not a coincidence that the Cuban purges began within days of the Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing.¹⁴

Another transformational blow that followed Aspillaga’s rallying to the CIA was that the nearly free ride the Cubans had so long enjoyed in foreign intelligence operations abruptly ended. Never again would Americans underestimate their capabilities; instead, virtually overnight they became a prime counterintelligence target, respected world-class foes. Aspillaga’s defection enabled Americans to better understand—and more easily counter—aggressive Cuban tradecraft. Cuban covert operations abroad were temporarily hobbled, nowhere more calamitously than in Latin America. According to DGI defector Roberto Hernández del Llano, more than 150 Cuban operatives there were compromised and taken out of service.¹⁵

A few officers who had been especially good friends of Aspillaga’s were withdrawn from their overseas posts as soon as it was known he was in American hands. He told me that in addition to Medina Perez in London, a close colleague in Paris was promptly recalled to Havana. Still another, the chief of counterin-telligence operations against the CIA in Havana, came under merciless scrutiny, either for misappropriating funds or grave errors of tradecraft somehow related to Aspillaga’s defection. With disgrace imminent, that officer put a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Almost immediately after Aspillaga’s defection, all of the doubles operations went to ground. Cuban moles and agents who feared they had been exposed surely became inactive, some perhaps permanently. The American professor who recruited students for the DGI was probably among them. Ana Montes was an unfortunate key exception. Already a Cuban spy, she had started work at the Pentagon in September 1985, nearly two years before Aspillaga defected, but did not come to his attention. It may have been because she remained in relatively low-level positions at first or because her case was strictly compartmented from the start, possibly even handled personally by Fidel.

Aspillaga did considerable additional damage by identifying a multitude of former associates. He shared with me a by-then somewhat stale directory of more than a thousand Cuban intelligence personnel who were active either on the island or overseas at the time of his defection. Inevitably, a new consensus formed in the American intelligence community. There was no avoiding the ugly truth: Fidel Castro was running exceptionally brilliant covert operations against American interests. In terms of almost every specialty and subdiscipline of human intelligence tradecraft, the Cubans have remained without peer, even after the losses and temporary degradation suffered in the late 1980s.

The nontechnical disciplines have always been their forte: espionage and counterespionage, double-agent and false flag operations, the running of illegals and agents of influence, the insertion of moles, covert action (what the Cubans call medidas activas, active measures), deception operations, surreptitious entry, and covert acquisition of technology—along with all of the subsidiary spycraft including, for example, document forgery, photography, disguise, surveillance, and countersurveillance that facilitate such work. Their expertise at double agent tradecraft and counterintelligence is without peer anywhere in the world.

Aspillaga believes that the Cubans are better at surveillance than any other intelligence service, even those of much larger and wealthier countries. “I had some friends who were brilliant,” he told me. “No one was better than them, not even the Russians or the CIA, nobody.”

In part, he said, it is because Cuba uses cunning psychological and behavioral analysis to anticipate what their quarries are likely to do. “When they are following you, they are examining your attitude. They would know way ahead of time before you would do something.”

Some of the espionage footage that was shown on Cuban television after Aspillaga defected was possible because of the use of such advanced tradecraft. Targets were studied and filmed so that staff psychologists could establish a baseline of their normal mannerisms, gait, affect, and other distinguishing characteristics. Any significant changes in their bearing or physical presentation could signal that they were planning to go covert. But to be fair, anyone trying to evade Cuban government surveillance on its home turf—where spies and agents and informers and snitches are everywhere, and where intelligence resources are virtually unlimited—is inevitably at a crippling disadvantage.

Aspillaga wrote about other remarkable elements of Cuban spycraft. Often entire brigades of surveillance specialists are deployed in Cuba to follow important targets, especially Americans known or suspected of being intelligence officers. During one of my visits to Havana, when I was a senior intelligence community official well known to the Cubans, I was followed by a large squad of surveillants all equipped with sophisticated miniature communications equipment. There are virtually no limits on the numbers of street agents who can be deployed. According to Aspillaga, “In many instances a large bus is utilized as it also serves to conceal personnel from view.”

The Cubans have elevated the craft of surreptitious entry to a level perhaps unmatched elsewhere. Since a government agency closely tied to intelligence manages all property rentals by foreigners on the island, agents can easily arrange illicit access to private properties. According to Aspillaga, foreign embassies and residences of western ambassadors and other diplomats were routinely penetrated.

Sometimes agents pump supposedly harmless gas under doors or through keyholes or other small openings to anesthetize sleeping residents. Agents can then easily enter and steal or copy documents or install listening devices and the miniature cameras Cuban intelligence calls visiles. Fidel himself originally authorized the use of sleeping gas against certain foreign diplomatic representatives in the mid-1960s, and the practice has continued.¹⁶

Castro’s role as Cuba’s supreme spymaster extends to all areas of exotic tradecraft. Even foreign heads of state or government are not immune. Aspillaga remembers an especially urgent operation run on Fidel’s orders against Yugoslav president Josef Broz Tito, who arrived in Havana on August 29, 1979, to participate in the summit meeting of the nonaligned nations.

Tito, one of the founders of that movement and an independent Marxist never closely tied to Castro’s more radical regime, was a vital intelligence target. During a meeting with other nonaligned leaders the previous July, he had sharply criticized Cuban military interventions in Africa. Fidel was worried the old and infirm Yugoslav partisan might openly repeat such criticisms in Havana, possibly even denounce Cuba as an ersatz nonaligned nation because of its close alliance with the Kremlin. Castro demanded that the DGI determine exactly what Tito planned to say in his address to the conference. The resulting covert operation was a stunning success. Aspillaga wrote about it, saying, “Fidel ordered that all of Tito’s personal documents be photocopied. A huge operation was prepared which concluded in the penetration of the embassy of Yugoslavia as well as the residence used by Tito.”

On August 31, Fidel hosted the Yugoslav leader during a private luncheon. By then he was satisfied that he would not be embarrassed on his home turf as he assumed the chairmanship of the nonaligned movement. The DGI had provided him documentary proof.

Aspillaga wrote that during such searches, residents’ personal items carrying their unique scents are routinely stolen and immediately sealed in vacuum containers. They are stored away in DGI facilities and brought out when they might aid in canine surveillance operations. Aspillaga told me, “It would surprise you to know the number of such personal items belonging to North American diplomats and other nationalities that are in storage.” I imagine they have my scent on file, some souvenir from my official visits to the island in the early 1990s.

Such shoe-leather skills constitute just one of several main intelligence disciplines, however. As good as the Cubans are at those, they certainly cannot compete with the enormous American intelligence community in scientific and technical collection, operational gadgetry, or airborne systems. Outside of Cuba—with the important exception of Miami—they do not rely extensively on bugs, taps, other sophisticated listening gear, or surreptitious entry.

Advanced code breaking is beyond Cuban capabilities, although in recent years agents have become proficient in secure, high-tech forms of agent communications. Havana does not loft reconnaissance and eavesdropping satellites into space. The Cuban intelligence community is too small to maintain a massive, worldwide communications intercept capability. Nor does it operate in dozens of countries around the world where it has few interests or little chance of penetrating CIA operations.

Rather, like Israeli intelligence, revolutionary Cuba has focused nearly all of its attention on perceived enemies. For the Castro brothers, there are fewer such enemies than the many Arab and Muslim countries the Mossad must contend with. For Cuban intelligence, the perception is that there are just two main adversaries: the American government—especially the CIA—and most Cuban exile organizations and leaders.

That focus permits a concentration of resources, efficiencies of scale, and the development over time of a depth of expertise. American targets are “the reason for being of the Cuban intelligence service,” ex-DGI officer Gerardo Peraza has said. All the other defectors I have consulted and interviewed agree. Hernández del Llano, who came to the United States after sixteen years of intelligence service, expressed it to me well: “Cuban intelligence has been targeting Americans— the great enemy—for fifty years. So it is not surprising they have had so many successes.”¹⁷