CIA's failures prompted decision

By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS and ANDRES OPPENHEIMER
Herald Staff Writers

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration barred U.S. spies from conducting covert operations in Cuba starting in December 1994 because of the CIA's
disastrous record on the island and an effort to smooth ties with Havana at the time, The Herald has learned.

The action restricted U.S. intelligence agents from such activities as actively recruiting new agents and promoting ways to destabilize the government.

Among other things, it forced the CIA to close a clandestine radio station that was broadcasting into Cuba, according to several former and current U.S. officials.

More than two years later, when Cuban MiG fighters shot down two U.S. civilian planes, President Clinton ordered stepped-up efforts to gather information on
Cuba through electronic eavesdropping and other passive means. But he retained the ban on cove rt operations.

Taken together, the disclosures suggest that, for all its tough rhetoric, the Clinton administration has been wary of using its intelligence assets against Cuba -- a nation
90 miles away, which it decries as a brutal dictatorship and terrorist state.

Interviews with half a dozen well-placed officials, who declined to be identified, indicate that two factors are key to understanding the administration's restraint: The CIA's poor, if not calamitous, record in Cuba, and early hopes among Clinton advi sers that hostilities with the government of President Fidel Castro could be significantly reduced.

White House spokesman Jim Fetig on Monday declined to respond to questions about the presidential decision.

"It's White House policy not to comment on intelligence matters,'' he said.

Repeated stumbles

Since the 1959 revolution, the CIA repeatedly has stumbled in Cuba, including ill-fated attempts to assassinate Castro in the 1960s, and to sabotage the island's
economy through the 1970s.

The CIA involvement in the island was documented in a 1987 Havana television program that dealt a humiliating blow to the agency. The eight-part series, The CIA
War Against Cuba, showed U.S. agents during their "secret'' rendezvous with their sources in Cuba. The documentary singled out four of the 13 U.S. Interest
Section's permanent employees and three of their wives as CIA agents.

Ten Cuban intelligence officials who the CIA believed had been its informants were exposed in the documentary as double agents who had been feeding the agency
Cuban government-prepared information for as long as years. Cuba said at the time it had deci ded to go public with their names after the defection of a high-ranking
Cuban military officer who was about to reveal their true allegiance.

"It caused a massive re-evaluation of our intelligence process,'' one former U.S. official said. "We had taken these guys as bona fide agents, only to find out that
every bit of information that they fed us was cooked up by the Cubans.''

The fiasco led to the forced departures of several U.S. spies and long prison sentences for their nongovernment Cuban contacts; it essentially wrapped up the
agency's covert operations in Cuba. Eventually, the documentary became a main attraction of th e Museum of the Interior Ministry, which was created to document
failed CIA plots in Cuba.

The hardest target

Chastened and gun-shy, the agency tried to regain its footing. But Cuba's higher circles continued to prove virtually impenetrable to U.S. agents. Its vast
counterintelligence network employed all the advantages of a police state in an island where the movements of U.S. officials and strangers can be easily monitored.

"The Cubans know everything we're doing. They've got the [U.S.] Interests Section covered like a blanket,'' one official said.

Added another U.S. policymaker: "Cuba was always the hardest target. It was much harder than Eastern Europe. The CDRs [neighborhood watch groups] were so
effective.''

In the summer of 1994, Castro presented the Clinton administration with its first Cuba crisis. After a series of boat hijackings by Florida-bound refugees, and a rare
anti-government protest in Havana, Castro allowed virtually anyone with a raft to set sail from the island.

Before long, the U.S. Navy was host to more than 30,000 Cuban refugees, who had been intercepted at sea and ferried to its Guantanamo Bay base. Pressure grew
on the administration from Cuban exiles demanding freedom for the refugees and from its own m ilitary unhappy with its new role as innkeeper. And Clinton's foreign
policy team decided it was time to revisit its intelligence activities in Cuba.

After a series of sporadic but increasingly urgent meetings over several months, the team concluded that the risk posed by renewing covert operations -- in terms of
both embarrassment to the United States and danger to Cuban collaborators -- outweighed any potential benefit.

In December, Clinton let lapse a "finding'' for Cuba, which was essentially a permission slip for the CIA to dedicate agents and resources to secret activities in Cuba
beyond passive intelligence gathering.

'Moral and political support'

Much of the CIA's activities, including active support for dissident groups, already had been curtailed after the 1987 setback, U.S. officials said. Despite Cuban
claims to the contrary, no covert aid has been supplied to dissident or human rights grou ps since the late '80s, they said.

"Our very hard official policy was that we did nothing for human rights groups that was not out in the open,'' said one U.S. diplomat who follows Cuban affairs.
"We provided moral and political support -- things like speaking out on their behalf, an d visiting with them, but did not give them financial assistance, not even fax
machines.''

Instead, the U.S. government has moved in a new direction in recent years. The administration has encouraged labor groups such as the AFL-CIO, church groups
such as the Roman Catholic charity, Caritas, and institutions such as the Ford Foundation to funnel resources to independent groups on the island.

At times, it has even come through with funds: Freedom House, a New York-based human rights group, recently received a $500,000 grant from the administration
to distribute pro-democracy literature and videos in Cuba. The termination of covert activ ities in Cuba also forced the closing of a CIA radio station that broadcast
to the island from outside the United States, one source said. While details of the station remain sketchy, its audience was a mere fraction of that of Radio Marti, the
U.S. gover nment broadcast to Cuba, and was viewed as expendable. Advocates of improving relations with Castro had won the day.

Several members of the National Security Council -- including adviser Anthony Lake, his deputy, Sandy Berger, Latin America adviser Richard Feinberg and
Democracy Unit chief Morton Halperin -- all gave their blessings to a more open policy toward Cuba that would reduce tensions and might lead to normalized ties.

"People thought something good was going to come,'' said one official who encouraged the warming trend.

Bridge-building ends

Within four months, Peter Tarnoff, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, had initiated two secret meetings with Cuban diplomat Ricardo Alarcon.

On May 2, 1995, both countries unveiled the controversial fruit of those talks: a migration pact under which Washington agreed to accept a minimum of 20,000
Cuban immigrants a year and to repatriate rafters intercepted at sea.

Although the Tarnoff-Alarcon accord was greeted with relief by most Floridians, it enraged many Cuban exiles, who felt it conferred legitimacy on the Castro
government and betrayed Cubans' quest for freedom. Cuban-American lawmakers bitterly attacked T arnoff in Congress.

In the aftermath of the downing of the two Brothers to the Rescue planes earlier this year, advocates of greater outreach toward Cuba today are either muzzled or
have left the administration.

Clinton, determined to show resolve against the Cuban attack, dropped his opposition to the embargo-tightening Helms-Burton bill and signed it into law March 12.
The change in policy virtually ended bridge-building efforts with Cuba, and prompted the r esignation of Clinton's special adviser for the island, Richard Nuccio.

By then, the era of late-night drops and hidden microphones was over.

Concluded one U.S. official: "The cloak-and-dagger stuff just didn't pan out.''