
BETRAYAL
Clinton, Castro & The Cuban Five
By Matt Lawrence & Thomas Van Hare
Copyright (©) 2009
Matt Lawrence and Thomas Van Hare
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or any other means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
In memory of los Hermanos:
Armando Alejandre, Jr.
Carlos Costa
Mario de la Peña
Pablo Morales
Your selfless humanitarian acts and heroism will never be forgotten...
"The ocean is not blue, it is black."
-- Pablo Morales
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Author's Note by Matt Lawrence
Author's Note by Thomas Van Hare
Chapter One: El Último Almuerzo (The Last Lunch)
Chapter Two: Anatomy of a Murder
Chapter Three: View to a Kill
Chapter Four: Sole Survivor
Chapter Five: Murder by Numbers
Chapter Six: Cuba's Queen of Spies
Chapter Seven: Complicity, Castro and the Clinton Administration
Chapter Eight: Betrayal
Chapter Nine: Elusive Truth
Chapter Ten: Havana's Daydreaming
Chapter Eleven: If the Phone Doesn't Ring, It's US
Chapter Twelve: Trials and Tribulations
Chapter Thirteen: Playing the System, the American Way
Chapter Fourteen: Indictments of Faith, Too Little Too Late
Chapter Fifteen: The Final Word
Afterward by Mayte Greco-Regan
Afterward by Jorge (Sonny) Dorrbecker
Key Chapter References and Bibliography
Author's Note
By Matt Lawrence
I was living on Summerland Key, Florida when I got the call on February 24, 1996. As I reached to grab the receiver, I happened to glance at the television just feet away from me in my small apartment -- the CNN Breaking News banner was displayed beneath "amateur video" of a smoke plume that stretched from the surface of the ocean to high in the sky.
As I picked up the phone, I heard the anchorwoman say something about some planes off the coast of Cuba.
On the other end of the line was a voice I'd not heard in over a year, and he didn't even bother to say hello. "The Brothers lost two today," my old friend Thomas Van Hare began abruptly. Before I could utter a word, the television pictures came into sharp focus as he finished his statement with the simple declaration, "Shot down by MiGs."
Like everyone who'd been involved in flying those rescue missions, I was staggered by the news. Over the years, most of us had thought something like this could happen. In fact, each of us had quietly accepted the risk of flying search and rescue missions off of Cuba's coast, knowing that the mission of saving lives was worth it. Many of us had been intercepted, buzzed by Cuban MiGs, witnessed helicopters and even been shadowed by Cubana airliners, which we later learned were usually flown by Cuban MiG pilots. Time and again, the Cuban MiGs and other intercept aircraft would return to their base, either chased away by U.S. fighter jets or having been recalled by their own ground controllers.
With each interception the Cuban Government made their message clear -- they didn't approve of our mission. Nonetheless, most of us never thought the Cubans would be so daring as to shoot down any of our planes. After all, it was a humanitarian mission, even if there were some political aspects to saving those attempting to flee a communist regime. Now, looking at the smoke plume on the television, I tried to make any sense of what had happened. I could not.
As the first days after the attack passed -- much of it in a blur -- we all began looking for answers. For my part, I started by doing searches on the then fledgling Internet and reading every newspaper and magazine I could find containing any story relating to the event. I found myself saving and rereading them, hoping that in cross-referencing the data, something new would emerge to explain what had happened. I needed to find out how Cuba could carry off what I considered to be nothing less than the murder of American citizens.
Since I'd flown the missions myself, the impact of the shootdown on a personal level was dreadfully profound. I knew some of the faces of those who lost their lives. I recognized that it could just as easily have been my plane that day, had I still been flying. Emotionally, the shootdown shook me to my core.
Nonetheless, like many others who were seeking answers at the time, I found they were not fast in coming. Months later, I realized that the truth was going to be hard to find. As a result, in the years that followed, uncovering the facts of what happened that day to Brothers to the Rescue became a profoundly personal mission.
And so it was; "The Box" was born.
Its first document was my Freedom Flight International flight manual with its notes and maps from the many missions we flew.
Subsequently, "The Box" served as my collection point for the years of newspaper and magazine articles that followed with information about the shootdown. Many of them were culled from the stories the press timed around every year's anniversary of the shootdown. In each story, it seemed that some new previously undisclosed tidbit of information was revealed. Year after year of research brought revelation after revelation -- and disbelief. It was apparent that the full story of what happened over the Straits of Florida had never been honestly presented to the American public. In fact, it was fast becoming my opinion that much of the truth had been covered up.
At the same time, my "old friend," co-author, and search and rescue pilot, Thomas Van Hare, had taken to sending me emails that quoted other news sources that he'd found in his own research. He also passed along translations of transcripts and other data that was emerging. It was as if both of us were preparing for something -- though as Thomas will admit, I was the one who had had obsessively taken the project on and had created "The Box."
Together, we were compiling the facts for some as yet undefined future project. It didn't take long before we realized that this story had to be told, as it really happened, not as portrayed piecemeal by the media, which presented only shards of the shattered truth, a little now, a little later when the editors would approve a new story.
And so it was, "The Box" became "The Book."
Over the years, it seemed that every time I started to write the first chapters, there was something that intervened, stopping me from writing the story as I knew it at the time. Year after year, some new discovery, a new arrest, a trial, or another revelation would appear. It seemed as if the full story was emerging only in fits and starts, dragged out by the years into the light of day. I realized that by the truth emerging in this way, the full impact of these murders was obscured except for those who, despite life's pressures and other interests, had not yet ceased following such news.
With every new disclosure, new questions emerged, further clouding the picture of what had happened. Time and again, it seemed that the tale was not fully revealed -- and the time to write the first chapter was not yet upon us. Many times I tossed my pen back to its desk drawer and continued my research -- and "The Book" would remain waiting for a while longer, lying dormant, yet continuing its call to me from inside "The Box."
Finally, in 2005, I began highlighting the key information and quotes and organizing the information in "The Box" for what I thought would be the final time. But yet again, the project was put on hold as the hurricane season of that year had me writing a preparedness guide, What To Do 'til The Cavalry Comes, with Thomas Van Hare as my editor and, in many ways, serving as my co-author.
Finally, with that project completed and published, I returned once again to pouring through the heaps of documents that we had assembled over the years. It was then that I realized that the truth of what had happened to the Brothers lay perfectly organized, right before my eyes in "The Box." I also realized that the book couldn't be done on my own. After a few phone calls and discussions, Thomas Van Hare joined me as a co-author.
In the three years since, an amazing thing happened: "The Book" essentially wrote itself right out of "The Box." And with it, as my co-author Thomas Van Hare put it, as if in some mystical pilot talk, "we've finally appeased the spirits of the dead by emotionally coming to terms with the loss."
What had started out as a search for the truth for us had ended as an answer that had to be shared. Yet as we were soon to discover, the truth of what happened that day, when four Americans lost their lives, was also nearly obscured in disinformation, misinformation, outright lies, cover-ups and political agendas -- most of which originated from across the Straits of Florida in Cuba, and yet some from our own government.
Sorting through the data and validating what was accurate and what was simply wrong or purposefully misleading was a Herculean task. It required hours of review, careful consideration, and reasoned evaluation to determine the importance and priority of each piece of the puzzle.
The clouds of disinformation and misinformation are thick -- so thick, in fact, that another author could write a book based on other public documents that might portray a completely different conclusion, particularly if they were politically motivated or wished to serve as apologists for Fidel Castro -- such as making claim that Cuba was justified in shooting down the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. Those schooled in international law would also note that such a claim is simply invalid. It's worth mentioning in this context that by international accord and accepted practice, there are no circumstances where fighter planes may shoot down unarmed civilian aircraft -- whether it's a Korean airliner off the coast of Siberia or a commercial aircraft attempting to penetrate the U.S. border -- in short, even if they trespass across borders or engage in political activities, shooting down civilian aircraft is illegal, morally unacceptable and criminal. As such, the events of 9/11 in America became not only a question of how America should respond but what could be done -- would U.S. fighter aircraft have been justified in shooting any of the planes on that terrible day when terrorists attacked. No such moral debate can apply to the shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes. They were flying a regular humanitarian, search and rescue mission. There was no imminent threat to Cuba. There were no terrorist hijackers involved, perpetrating an act of war against the island of Fidel's revolution. There was no way that the shootdown was justified, legal or right.
Nonetheless, even in light of this simple point in international law, in writing this book, we took pains to tell all sides of the story. We've gone to great lengths to express what we believe to be the most accurate picture yet to emerge of the facts. Outside of this book, no other record exists that combines and presents such hard evidence, sworn testimony and proven data into a single concise story.
Together, Thomas Van Hare and I were able to compose this documentary story literally from the perspective of two men who themselves flew the search missions. We were also able to write it from the perspective of those who knew most of those involved and those who died. Furthermore, this book is also written to include the perspective of my co-author who once worked and walked within the very halls of the Pentagon where much of the back story to this book played out. Even if he purposefully took great pains to avoid using his position within the Pentagon to research additional data and information about the shootdown, his perspective on "how things work" was essential for the book, putting it in context and making clear the circumstances of that day.
In the end, what came out of the "The Box" was a stunning revelation of betrayal. Yet we would be remiss if we were to leave the impression that this betrayal was by the U.S. Government alone -- it was instead a betrayal undertaken by a smaller number of senior Clinton Administration officials and Cuban spies who by their actions and inaction together contributed to the shootdown itself. It was also a betrayal of ideals and a criminal act on the part of the Government of Cuba -- and to avoid any moral relativism, just because this crime was committed by Cuba and such things can be expected of a dictator such as Fidel, that doesn't give the Cubans a pass on what took place or excuse them from compliance with international law. On that count, as the pages of this book will reveal, we, the co-authors, are in complete concurrence with the findings of the courts, both domestic and international.
Betrayal: Clinton, Castro & The Cuban Five is our own compilation of the facts based on years of collecting data and research about this case. There are numerous legal cases to review and a seeming mountain of documentation, including numerous claims and counter-claims. For instance, the legal case concerning the Cuban spies known as the Cuban Five is still ongoing and, incredibly, some say they can now document it as the longest running legal case in U.S. history. Even if that seems unlikely, at this point, it has certainly surpassed all possible expectations for duration, cost and difficulty. From those trials, new revelations have emerged even in the last year.
The information in each chapter of our book is sourced from public record and is fully documented -- meticulously backed up by the contents of "The Box." Newspaper articles and other sources, including court testimony and transcripts, are further substantiated by printed interviews. What is presented is assembled and linked together carefully and conservatively -- many questions remain unanswered and there are many implications from the data.
Ultimately, this is a tale of murder on the part of Cuba, seen against a backdrop of indecisive backroom U.S. politics, rogue international diplomacy and blatant ignorance or cold acceptance of the advance knowledge of the shootdown. It is also a well-documented description of the key events of the shootdown itself. The events that transpired, not just on the day of the shootdown but in the months leading up to that day, should have raised red flags amongst our nation's leadership -- right up to and including the office of the President of the United States, Bill Clinton.
The Cubans were able to carry out a brutal attack not only against the four aviators of Brothers to the Rescue, but against the United States of America. Four men paid the price and our nation was left with a black eye.
Matt Lawrence
Former Director of Special Projects & Chief Mission Specialist
Freedom Flight International
Author's Note
By Thomas Van Hare
Betrayal: Clinton, Castro & The Cuban Five highlights the extraordinary tale of the shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft off the coast of Cuba on February 24, 1996. It details the circumstances and events surrounding the deaths of four fellow pilots, some of whom were friends of mine: Armando Alejandre, Jr., Carlos Costa, Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales. It tells of the incredible escape of one of the planes, carrying Jose Basulto, Arnaldo Iglesias and the Iriondos, a husband and wife team who were along that day as guests and observers.
While it may sound saccharin, I feel I have to write that we flew together, we laughed together and we saved lives together -- and they paid the ultimate price for the "crime" of saving saves. Like Carlos and Mario, I was a Command Pilot and former Mission Director with the group -- while they went by "Seagull Charlie" and "Seagull Mike," my call sign was "Seagull Tango." My association with Carlos Costa was the closest. I helped train him in how to serve as the group's Operations Director, a position I once held and to which Carlos succeeded me. I miss him the most, a man many of us called, "El Intenso" because of his singular focus on saving lives. Mario and Pablo I met quite a few times and flew with -- I remember Mario as a young, idealistic, hopeful and wonderful young man. Pablo was one of several rafters who flew with us and, because of my limited ability in Spanish, we were never close, but if my records are right, I orbited over his raft the day he was found, keeping watch and helping to keep him alive until the Coast Guard arrived. And I never met Armando -- the day of the shootdown was his second flight with the group.
Today, the names of the four we lost that day are seemingly little more than footnotes in the appalling history of US-Cuban relations. For most people, even Cuban-Americans, their loss is little more than a distant memory. Yet for me, even now, nearly thirteen years later, they remain fellow airmen and old friends. Their faces are indelibly etched into my memory.
Despite our lifesaving mission, Fidel Castro officially declared us to be little more than "Air Pirates." Despite the overt absurdity of that claim, I consider that title one of the best monikers ever granted to me. I bear it with honor and pride. I also know that the term is little more than another bit of Cuban propaganda. In that regard, I guess all of us who flew the mission are proud to be "Air Pirates," if saving lives earns you that title. For my part, I am proud to have been a search and rescue pilot and proud to have flown many of those missions, three to four times a week, for several years of my life.
The personal knowledge and first hand perspective that comes from flying off the coast of Cuba and of knowing those who flew has helped me immensely in organizing and writing this story. My experiences in fairly senior positions within the Pentagon itself have also proven invaluable. On the other hand, none of the research or information in this book was brought to light through Pentagon relationships or classified sources -- the full book is based on public sources alone and I took great pains to avoid any official inquiry into the events of that day during my time working within the Department of Defense.
Critics of our writing may wish to claim that the experiences of flying with the group and working at the Pentagon have tainted my views and resulted in a certain bias. Such arguments have almost no merit -- in fact, the opposite is true. The very fact that I was there, flying those missions, as was Matt Lawrence, gives us a unique a powerful insight into the actual operations and methods used by the group in performing its life saving mission. To claim that this personal experience would disallow us from authoring this book because of potential bias would also, by inference, mean that those who witness war should never be allowed to report upon it or, similarly, those who drive on the NASCAR circuit cannot be trusted to write about the experience.
The reality is that we, the two co-authors, are able to bring a unique and powerful insight into the facts and detail of this book because we were there. Perhaps no other pair of authors could have done this subject the justice it deserves. This book is a documentary -- and the data within it is well-researched and stands on its own.
Nonetheless, with that said, I will not deny that I am no fan of Fidel or Raul Castro -- nor of their Cuban Revolution. Their record of policies and actions has resulted in the deaths of perhaps as many as 24,000 Cuban balseros in the Straits of Florida and the oppression of an island that if not for their influence, would undoubtedly be one of the strongest economies and leading states in the region. Put simply, under the Castros, Cuba has forged a path into becoming little more than a second rate Third World country, despite the potential of its citizens. Today, it remains a prison for intellectuals and a carefully managed, failed socialist state. It is one of the last footnotes in the story of the collapse of communism and the fall of socialism as governing ideals. While the rest of the world has moved on to better days, time stands still on the island, as evidenced by the classic 1950s era cars that are seen everywhere on the island and in the steady deterioration of seemingly nearly every building on the island.
In writing this book, my co-author Matt Lawrence and I have told the story as it was revealed to us, even in the most terrible detail. We will let the reader decide if the documents and data hold up as valid under scrutiny. The points made are supported with citations in the key references section in the last pages of this story.
Admittedly, this book paints a dark picture. What makes it all the more disturbing is that it is a tale that reaches into the halls of the White House. This story includes hard evidence that senior Clinton Administration officials and friends, such as Sandy Berger and Gov. Bill Richardson, knew of or should have reasonably understood well in advance the Cuban Government's plans to shoot down the Brothers to the Rescue planes. Even though it can be reasonably shown that they recognized or should have recognized Cuba's intent to kill Americans, these officials and others inexplicably chose to remain silent and not intervene. From a personal perspective, I find that abhorrent -- and some may also claim that this evidences a bias on my part in writing this story. Even there, I would still disagree -- my emotions and personal views are based on heartfelt values, but I have written the story as a documentary and not as an attempt at persuasion.
This book does NOT conclude that these same officials were directly complicit in the deaths of these four men even if there are many who believe that the U.S. Government colluded with Fidel Castro to kill these four men. As such, they will publicly declare -- and probably quite loudly -- that we are wrong in our view. However, in writing this book, we have concluded that the record and the evidence do not show a conspiracy at all. Instead, we only conclude that, as is often said in Washington, mistakes were made.
None of us should ever lose sight of the fact that Fidel Castro ordered the death of these men. The Cuban Air Force carried out the deed and afterward celebrated their successes. The responsibility for this murder starts and ends right there in Cuba, no matter how you look at it -- even if there were a number of senior Clinton Administration officials who could have stepped in stopped the events from happening. In that regard, the U.S. Government failed utterly in their responsibility to protect fellow Americans -- and some feel completely justified in saying that the shootdown never warranted serious response because the United States and its government were never seriously threatened by Cuba.
Despite the loss we all felt and despite the dark nature of this tale, this story also highlights the lives and mission of an extraordinary group of men who risked their lives to save others. It reminds us of those who paid the ultimate price for the humanitarian goal of saving lives. The individuals depicted in this book are not celebrated as heroes in the strictest sense, even if they have saved dozens of lives and, in some cases, even hundreds of lives each. Jokingly, I might add that most of us would be uncomfortable with any title except "Air Pirate" anyway. Yet they were the best damn heroes I've ever flown with.
Looking back, on balance we did alright -- and we'd all do it again if called, even despite the risk. All told, we saved over 17,000 balseros, counting those spotted during the mass exodus of 1994. We lost four of our own to Cuban MiGs.
That isn't a bad record -- 17,000 to 4, yet I still don't like the trade. I miss them still.
This story is also one caught up in stress between Cuban Exile politics and the ongoing war of words between the U.S.A. and Cuba. It is a tale of a White House fraught with conflicting policies and careening toward disaster. It is also the story of a president, Bill Clinton, who presided over the most far-reaching changes in U.S.-Cuba policy since Fidel Castro came to power -- the redefinition of those who try to escape a communist state as little more than "migrants" and the creation of the near senseless "wet foot, dry foot" policy that coldly returns many of those now found at sea back into the grip of the communist system from which they had dared to escape. For that alone, some might say that the Clintons have few friends in Miami.
In many ways too, Betrayal: Clinton, Castro & The Cuban Five is a tale that we, the two co-authors, wrote to celebrate what it is to be an American. In writing this book, we celebrate the principles of freedom of the press and the right to uncover the truth, even when things go wrong at the very highest levels. Even though this story highlights the many mistakes that were made, I must also now take a moment to salute the U.S. Military and America's volunteer soldiers for the incredible role they play in defending our way of life, our liberties and our freedom. I would also like to thank the members of the U.S. Coast Guard for their extraordinary mission and dedication in saving lives and protecting America.
Beyond this book's singular focus on the outright murder of American citizens by Cuba, it is a page-by-page revelation of what I believe to be the ultimate betrayal of America and its values by the Clinton Administration. Yet a story like Betrayal cannot and should not shake our confidence in our democracy and in our country -- even if absolutely it must shake our confidence and trust in some of those who in this matter, despite their sworn duty in public service, failed in their responsibility to serve and protect America and its people.
My final hope is that perhaps enough time has gone by that the publication of this book will help bring about a new government inquiry into the real story of what happened that day -- without the misinformation and political spin that dominated the headlines at the time. Justifiably, the deaths of these men deserve further review. Many questions remain unanswered. The public has a right to know what really happened.
Thomas "Seagull Tango" Van Hare
Former Command Pilot, Mission Director & noted Air Pirate.
El Último Almuerzo
(The Last Lunch)
Saturday, February 24, 1996, began like most days for the aviators of Brothers to the Rescue. The organization's Director of Operations, 29 year old Carlos Costa, pulled together his flight bag for the day's mission, anticipating nothing more than he'd experienced in the 140 rescue missions he'd already flown. With any luck, he would spot a Cuban raft on the water and save a few more lives, thus adding to his personal tally of 456 "saves."
A graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and a training specialist at Miami International Airport, Costa was planning a day at the beach with friends after completing the mission. Before leaving the home he shared with his parents, Costa also packed his swimsuit, a tube of sun block and a towel. His only thought of what might interrupt his beach plans would be if he spotted a raft on the waves. Otherwise, he envisioned himself enjoying the sand and surf by late afternoon. After four years flying with Brothers to the Rescue, the day's flight plan was routine. In a rush as always, he left home without kissing his mother goodbye.
At the same time, Costa's friend and fellow pilot, Mario de la Peña, was preparing to leave his parent's house, concerned more with cashing a $30 expense reimbursement check from the Brothers to the Rescue organization than with the bigger questions of his future. While his life's dream was to earn commercial pilot ratings and start a career with a major airline, cashing the check was more on his mind as the sun rose into the sky. Before depositing it, he wanted to get permission from the Brothers to the Rescue chairman, Jose Basulto.
A 24 year old senior from Costa's alma mater, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Mario de la Peña was an experienced Brothers to the Rescue pilot, having logged more than 95 flights over the Florida Straits. Those missions had served a dual purpose -- while saving hundreds of lives, he was building multi-engine flight time -- time which he'd hoped one day would help him get into the airlines.
Another Brothers' pilot, American Airlines Captain Steve Walton, had inspired Mario to apply for an internship at the airline. Based on AA's interview and qualification process, Mario had landed an internship there. Clearly, his plans were coming together and he was on his way to becoming a First Officer.
Across town, de la Peña's spotter for the upcoming mission, Armando Alejandre, Jr., was also preparing his departure. The forty-five year old retired U.S. Marine Corps sergeant, veteran of two tours of Vietnam and a father, dashed out the door of the home he shared with his wife, Marlene, barely saying goodbye.
"I screamed at him to give me a kiss, but he was already gone," she told a Miami Herald reporter in 1997. Armando was not a pilot, but rather had volunteered that day to serve as one of the Brothers observers whose job it was to scan the waves for any sign of rafters below. He was new to flying with Brothers to the Rescue and the flight of February 24, 1996, was to be his second mission. He had joined the group because he felt that the humanitarian efforts of the organization were aimed at the hearts of the Cuban people -- and saving lives mattered. Like many Cuban-Americans, he was an American citizen. Still, Alejandre always held a deep sense of love for his homeland of Cuba -- or at least the Cuba from the times before Fidel Castro had come to power. Armando was also active in Cuban Exile politics and was considered a rising star in the exile community's leadership.
Early that morning, 29 year old Pablo Morales read his daily devotional before rushing off to work to drive his route of supermarkets as a salesman for a local Cuban foods distributor. Pablo was one of the many rafters rescued by the Brothers to the Rescue planes. Now, as his way of giving back, he flew with the very flight crews he credited with saving his life. Like Armando, he too worked as a spotter/observer. He knew the importance of his position within the group. If it hadn't been for another spotter just like himself four years earlier, Pablo would have died.
Born under Castro's revolution, Morales came to his own personal realization early on that "everything about it was a farce," yet he loved the land he left behind. After arriving in the United States, he wrote, "In American soil, I experienced the immensity of liberty for which I longed in the land I left behind. Here I will struggle tirelessly to see my country free of evil. I will strive to gain true freedom."
These four men were all brothers of another sort, with a shared belief that their mission -- the mission of saving lives -- was worth the risk to themselves. Together, the roughly 100 Brothers pilots and spotter/observers had saved thousands at sea. Even to this day, it is a record of success that is unchallenged in the annals of search and rescue history.
By 9 a.m. on February 24, 1996, these four men were all fighting the usual morning traffic, hoping to be on time to the Brothers to the Rescue hangar at Opa Locka Airport, located in North Miami-Dade County. There they would meet up with the other crew members and the group's leader, Jose Basulto, to begin the final planning for the day's search flights.
Jose Basulto, a Miami builder and chairman of Brothers to the Rescue, was one of the Miami Cuban exile community's leading proponents of non-violent demonstration. Yet for those who knew his history, it was something of a revelation that he'd come to a point in his life where he'd dedicated himself to peaceful protest and humanitarian action.
Basulto's life history reads like a movie script. During an interview for Monk Magazine in November 1998 with writer, Michael Lane, he openly answered questions about his past.
Born in Cuba in 1940, Jose Basulto lived in the island nation until he was 19 years old, when he came to Boston to study. A year later in 1960, with the government falling to Fidel Castro's Revolución, he returned to the island to join friends in the underground resistance against the new regime.
Soon after arriving in Cuba, Basulto was recognized by the CIA and selected for eleven months of training in Guatemala and Panama. The U.S. Government's Central Intelligence Agency was deeply involved in the attempted overthrow of the Castro regime -- a viewpoint in line with the goals of many anti-Castro Cubans like Basulto.
After completing his CIA training, he returned to Cuba as a clandestine radio operator to make preparations for what would soon become the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. While other radio operators were insistent on working in Havana, Basulto volunteered for duty in the provinces. He remained "on station" in Cuba from February until May of 1961, when, having escaped detection (perhaps in large part because he was not in the capital city), he made his way east and jumped the fence to safety at Guantanamo Naval Air Station. Having survived his first mission, he was flown back to a military base in Florida to prepare for another clandestine operation.
After the Bay of Pigs debacle, Jose Basulto returned again to his homeland, this time to conduct anti-Castro operations. However, just three days after he arrived, the mission was cancelled. Staying undercover, his team escaped the island again without being detected.
Basulto's final covert act was to organize a raid against a Cuban hotel that was a temporary base to a group of Soviet soldiers. At the time, President John F. Kennedy was insistent that the Soviets had not penetrated the island. Feeling that this was a politically motivated charade, Basulto set out to prove the truth by organizing his own rogue operation. The CIA was not informed of his plans and so, he left with no support. Taking a small boat southward across the Straits of Florida, he arrived off the coast of Cuba at 11:30 p.m. He and his small crew had learned the hard way the dangers of the journey across the Straits of Florida. Even after having the engine quit along the way and diverting off course they eventually found their target -- the Hotel Rosita de Ornedo.
With gasoline pooling in the hull of their small boat, Basulto fired 15 shells, risking an explosion with each shot as the cannon sparked downward. None of the shells were high explosive and the only damage done was to the hotel's façade. Falling to the whim of another of his crew, a 16 shell was lofted at the hotel before they turned and fled back to Florida.
While their attack scared a lot of people, Basulto is emphatic that nobody in the hotel was injured (although other sources, including the Monk Magazine article claim otherwise). Their mission had been a political one, not a military operation with the goal of killing enemy soldiers and the small, handheld cannon they employed was hardly powerful enough to do any real damage.
Yet from a political standpoint, Basulto's attack was successful. When the smoke cleared, President Kennedy's claims that the Soviets were not in Cuba were proven to be false -- and the event received a bit of press coverage as a result. Even with that proof, however, Basulto's hope for a harder line from Washington was unfulfilled. U.S. policy toward Cuba remained unchanged.
Jose Basulto was never thoroughly questioned about the attack. After leaving the CIA, he resigned himself to a different life in Miami, leaving covert missions and operations behind. Looking back at those days of armed resistance, he recognized that his acts and the sacrifices of those around him were pointless. He felt that they were little more than futile attempts at overthrowing an already entrenched, fortified Soviet-backed regime.
The Cuban exiles in Miami had taken the wrong approach if they were to overthrow Fidel Castro. Early on, Basulto had concluded that by meeting violence with violence, the exiles only further justified the oppression of the new Castro government.
Years later, he would sum up the futility of violent actions in his interview with Monk. He stated, "...trying to raise funds for weapons and go to war against Cuba by small groups... is ridiculous because Castro will always have more money, more weapons and more power in that respect. We consider that a waste of time. Secondly, lobbying the United States to accomplish the changes in Cuba, which is what the Cuban American National Foundation had been doing for years. We think time has proven that line of thinking doesn't lead anywhere. Then we have another one, a third way of going about it which is the use of non-violence...."
As the first rafters of the late 1980s struggled to reach the Florida Keys, news articles stirred Basulto to action. Several other Cuban-Americans were also taking steps to help, and soon Basulto was organizing his own group. He advertised in the local newspaper looking for volunteer pilots to fly rescue missions. A pilot and plane owner, Basulto thought it natural that the best way to conduct rescue missions would be by air. From this small start, the idea of one man, began the flights that would save thousands of Cubans.
In just a few short years, Jose Basulto became one of the most publicly recognized figures in the Cuban exile community. The universally recognized leader of the rescue pilots became the chairman of his new charitable group, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, tax-exempt organization named, Hermanos al Rescate, or more formally, Brothers to the Rescue, Inc.
After several weeks of flying weekend missions, the new organization had its first success when a group of rafters were spotted by a Cuban exile pilot named Juan Gonzales. Juan was a grandfatherly figure and a flight instructor who himself had escaped Cuba thirty years earlier just after Fidel Castro had come to power. Unlike the rafters who were taking to the seas beginning in the late 1980s, Juan Gonzales had simply gone down to the local Cuban airport where he was doing flight instructor work, fueled up his twin-engine Cessna 310, and flown north to Florida. Thirty years later, his eyes were still sharp enough to find the first rafters from the cockpit of a single-engine Cessna 172.
In the six years since that first rescue, the Brothers organization expanded to become far more professional and extremely experienced. For safety reasons, they "graduated" to all twin-engine aircraft and became experts at navigating precise track lines with GPS systems that had been donated by the Trimble avionics company.
The days of the Cessna 172s were over. The group's preferred aircraft became the Cessna 337 Skymaster, a unique aircraft sometimes called the "push-pull" or "mix master." These terms described the plane's unique appearance with twin boom tails, twin rudders and twin engines, each mounted on the central fuselage, one forward and one aft. For such missions, having two engines offered greater safety than a single engine aircraft.
The aircraft also shared the design of many Cessna general aviation airplanes with the wing mounted over the top of the cockpit, which afforded the crews better visibility of the waters below during their search missions.
Despite the preference for the Skymaster, the group utilized a number of conventional twin engine aircraft as well, including such planes as Piper Aztecs, Twin Comanches, and even a rare Piper Apache 235. This latter aircraft was known as "Big Red," and carried the tail number of N13BR -- the plane of the American Airlines captain and Brothers to the Rescue Command Pilot, Steve Walton, known as "Seagull Sierra."
Yet of all of the types flown over the years, the Skymaster had proven itself to be the best plane for the mission. Twenty years earlier, a variation of the same type, the O-2 Super Skymaster, had served as primary the USAF's forward air control aircraft in Vietnam, yet the vast majority of Skymasters around the world were civilian models, as were all of the aircraft flown by the Brothers organization.
By 1996, the group's Cessna 337 Skymasters were almost the only planes being flown.
Originally the group had flown periodic flights on odd weekends, when funding was available. By 1992, Basulto's Brothers to the Rescue organization had a broad base of over 20,000 donors and the group was flying three to four times a week on a regular schedule with three to five aircraft on each mission.
Basulto was always proud to point out that the group didn't rely on a single dollar from the U.S. Government. The average donor, he used to say, was an old Cuban grandmother on a fixed income who would send in as little as $5 or $10 a month to help save lives.
Missions averaged seven hours in the air. Thus, during a typical week, ten to twelve flights were flown by as many as thirty or forty volunteer aircrew members, putting in perhaps 70 to 100 hours of flight time searching the Straits of Florida. For a private organization, this was a huge undertaking yet one that had also proven its worth -- their flights had resulted in thousands of lives saved.
As February 24, 1996, dawned, there was no reason for anyone in the group to suspect that anything special was in the offing -- after all, it was another mission of mercy, one flown three times a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays (as well as sometimes even on Sundays), as regular as clockwork, even if in recent months the group had scaled back its flight operation. The group had also partly reoriented itself to assisting Cubans who had escaped to the Bahamas, where they were stranded by politics, hoping to eventually make it to the United States.
The mission that day first had been intended as a flight to drop off food supplies to the Cubans in the Bahamian camps. Afterwards, they were going to fly a single search pass along the northern coast of Cuba. With February drawing to a close, the "rafter season," as Jose Basulto liked to call it, was just beginning. Thus, the day's flight was to serve a dual purpose -- to be the first search flight of the year and, more coincidently, to be a symbolic gesture of support to the so-called Concilio Cubano, a group of domestic Cuban humanitarian rights groups that were scheduled to hold a meeting that day in Havana.
However, circumstances had already intervened and the day before, the mission plans had been amended. Surprisingly, the Government of the Bahamas had denied the Brothers to the Rescue planes clearance to bring in the food. A Cuban Government delegation was supposed to be visiting the islands and it seemed that the Bahamians did not want to have both the Brothers flights and the Cubans on the island at the same time, perhaps fearing a possible confrontation. As a result, the Brothers to the Rescue group instead elected to just fly a regular three plane search mission that day -- the food was to be left behind for the following week's mission.
As Friday evening drew close, calls went out to the usual list of volunteer pilots who flew on Saturdays. While many of the Brothers organization were of Cuban descent, the group was also supported by pilots from Europe, South America and the United States. Somehow, by simple coincidence, only Cuban-Americans and Cuban immigrants were available to fly February 24, 1996 -- an exceedingly rare occasion.
As Alejandre, Costa, de la Peña, and Morales arrived at the Brothers to the Rescue hangar at Opa Locka Airport, their crew assignments for the day's mission were made. Carlos Costa, known among the pilots by his well-earned call sign of "Seagull Charlie," was one of the most experienced Command Pilots in the group. The term, "Seagull" is an internationally recognized moniker for a search and rescue pilot or plane. Costa was assigned one of the group's Cessna 337 Skymaster planes for the day's mission, of which he was serving as both Command Pilot and Mission Director, thus putting him in overall charge of the flight operations.
The night before, when planning the day's mission, Costa had selected Mario de la Peña, as the second Command Pilot. Like Carlos, Mario was an experienced Command Pilot, known by his call sign, "Seagull Mike." Costa further assigned Armando Alejandre, Jr., to fly as Mario's observer.
Jose Basulto went by the call sign "Seagull One," signifying his leadership of the group, and as usual was to fly his airplane, N2506, a tail number he had requested specially from the FAA as a tip of the hat to those who fought at the Bay of Pigs with the Cuban Brigade 2506. It was a subtle political statement that most people missed, including many Cubans.
The three pilots wrote up their flight plans and Costa filed them with the FAA. Their original mission plan routed the three planes from Opa Locka Airport, southeast to the Bahamas, then south towards the swift moving currents of the Florida Straits before turning west in the international airspace more than 12 miles off the northern coast of Cuba. The planes then would pass Havana, turn north and come back eastward on their final leg before turning towards Florida and home.
As a rule, the flight crews would return to the airports at Key West or Marathon for fuel and a dinner break. As night fell, they'd fly back to Opa Locka, wash the salt spray off the planes and put them into the hangar. The missions involved long days, with the flight crews leaving in the early morning, searching for up to 8 hours in the air and returning late at night.
The take off time listed on their flight plan was 10:15 a.m. As was standard practice, the track lines were assigned and defined by "turn points" at the end of each one. Despite this precision in planning, however, the usual flight plans simply established a general area of operations defined by a series of points outlining a large rectangular search area. Flight planning also stated that the pilots would conduct operations at an altitude of 500 feet and below.
This exact format for flight plan filing had been agreed to under the advice and guidance of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 1991. It allowed the flexibility to reassign aircraft to orbit over any rafts that were found without having to cancel or modify their flight plans during rescue operations. On the date of the shootdown, this flight planning had been the standard operating procedure for five years, without complaint or issues.
As was customary with all Brothers' flight plans, the FAA routinely forwarded the paperwork to Havana, an act that was an accepted practice though not, in the strictest terms, mandated by ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) regulations. Such filings served to reduce the risk of an accidental confrontation and were in accordance with procedures followed by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the U.S. Customs Service, both of which also regularly tracked the flights and had reviewed the Brothers' operations.
Once the crew and plane assignments were made, the mission was ready to launch. Yet, that morning, as sometimes happened, the unexpected occurred at the last moment. In a surprise announcement, Jose Basulto ordered that the takeoff time be held back. He'd learned that a mechanic who sometimes worked on his organization's aircraft had landed in Cuba during the preceding week while returning from a vacation in Cancun. The passenger plane on which he had been flying had suffered a problem with one of its engines which forced the airline pilot to make a precautionary landing in Cuba for repairs. Cuban authorities had detained the mechanic until 3 a.m. the previous night. Now, as the morning hours ticked by, the mechanic was letting Jose know what had happened just in case his unintended stopover in Cuba could have affected the upcoming mission.
After a lengthy discussion, Basulto and one of his crewmembers for the day's mission, Arnaldo Iglesias, decided the mechanic's detention had been routine and decided the whole affair was meaningless. From their perspective, the detention itself was just typical and another example of the paranoid nature of Cuba's communist government.
A Cuban-American, Arnaldo Iglesias was raised in Mexico before finally coming to live in Miami years earlier. A close and trusted friend of Jose Basulto, Arnaldo had been invited to join the Brothers to the Rescue early on and to serve as the group's formal secretary. Iglesias knew that caution was a necessary element of every flight, so the fact that the mechanic had been detained in Cuba was important to him and he pressed the issue until it became clear that there was no problem.
His caution was not unfounded. Many in the Brothers to the Rescue group had long suspected that it was possible that Cuban agents would one day try to sabotage one of their airplanes so that it would crash during a mission -- and such a loss would be seen as just another small airplane accident.
By the time the issue of the mechanic's unexpected stopover in Cuba had been resolved, it was already after 11 a.m. That left the aviators with a late departure and possibly a shortened flight. The mission was only flown in daylight hours. More mundanely, they faced another dilemma -- whether or not they should have lunch before they flew.
Carlos Costa was eager to fly the mission so he could get to the beach. However, he was easily outvoted by the others whose appetites were growing with each passing hour. With little choice, Carlos took Mario to get burgers and fries for the others, including Jose Basulto's two independent observers, Sylvia and Andres Iriondo, who he'd invited to accompany the mission that day.
Unbeknownst to Basulto and his flight crews, as they sat at Opa Locka Airport contemplating lunch, North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) radar monitors were showing something ominous in the airspace north of Cuba. Both Miami Radar and the NORAD radar systems showed a pair of very high speed aircraft, apparently Cuban MiG jet fighters, flying low over the waters along Cuba's northern coast in formation, as if they were searching for other aircraft.
Such flights by Cuban MiGs were very rare given the fuel and spare parts shortages facing the Cuban Air Force's fighter arm and thus, in response, the USAF scrambled two of its own fighter interceptors from Homestead Air Force Base, just south of Miami. This caused the two Cuban aircraft to turn back to Cuba and land without further incident.
As that small drama played out, Havana's Air Traffic Control Center also made a completely unprecedented inquiry to the air traffic controllers of Miami Center, asking about the status of the three aircraft for which flight plans had been filed and which they expected should have been just north of Cuba at that time. Unlike U.S. air traffic centers, Havana's air traffic controllers report directly to and fall under the authority of the military, making what seemed on the surface to be a standard inquiry even more ominous.
In response, Miami Center relayed to Havana that the Brothers to the Rescue flight plans had never been formally opened and had since expired and been removed from the system. Quite simply, the Brothers to the Rescue planes were still on the ground.
Ignorant of transpiring events, Carlos and Mario even then were ordering hamburgers at a nearby restaurant in the town of Opa Locka. No one at the FAA or at NORAD called to warn Jose Basulto or anyone else in the Brothers to the Rescue group that Cuban MiGs had been picked up on radar flying over the search zone, nor did they relate that the Cuban air traffic controllers had simultaneously called Miami Center asking the whereabouts of their three planes. Despite this seemingly obvious connection, it seemed that nobody had put the two events together or thought to make a simple phone call to warn the Brothers organization.
Unaware of the threat looming southward, the pilots and spotters finished lunch in the lounge of Opa Locka's Hangar One before Basulto delivered his normal pre-mission briefing. Given the late hour, Jose wanted to reverse the flight routing and fly instead directly to the area where the group had made most of its rescues over the years. This change in the flight plan would give the group more time before dark to coordinate a pick-up of any who were spotted.
As was customary on missions when guests were aboard, the Brothers pilots, the spotters and the Iriondos discussed the dangers of flying such a humanitarian mission. Everyone was reminded that flying low over the water, at an altitude of 500 feet and below, close to the coast of Cuba, involved some level of risk. Furthermore, it would be hot, with the sun beating down raising the temperature inside the planes' cockpits to nearly 120º Fahrenheit. Search and rescue operations, even when well-planned, were risky -- they were nothing like a leisurely flight to the Bahamas for an impromptu vacation. The potential risks were even outlined on a large sign that hung on the hangar wall reminding all of the dangers they faced, even the possibility of death, when flying south off Cuba's coastline, over the water.
The cautioning conversation caused Andres Iriondo to suggest to his wife that perhaps they should fly in separate aircraft. Sylvia declined. She was not comfortable flying in small planes and wanted her husband next to her. After careful consideration, they chose to fly with Basulto and his copilot, Arnaldo Iglesias, where they were comfortably together. For the Iriondos, that simple decision would prove later to have been an incomprehensibly lucky choice.
A short while later, Carlos Costa called the FAA a second time to file new flight plans for an afternoon mission. Once again, nobody thought to advise him of the earlier appearance of the Cuban MiGs, nor of the call from Havana Center asking their whereabouts. If the Brothers organization had heard such alarming news, they would certainly have remained on the ground that day. As with the day's earlier flight plans, these new filings were forwarded to Havana by the FAA and, therefore, were unwittingly provided also to the Cuban Air Force.
Before takeoff, the pilots, spotters and observers followed one more tradition as they gathered together and stood in a circle, holding hands to say a prayer for their safety and for the rafters. The prayer circle had begun in 1991 and over the years had developed into a hallmark of every mission that the group flew. When finished, the members of the group exchanged hugs, shared a little pre-mission levity and headed off to their assigned aircraft. On many such missions, the pilots would enjoy a final little cup of Cuban coffee.
A little after 1 p.m., Carlos Costa, flying with his usual call sign, "Seagull Charlie," and his observer, Pablo Morales, rolled down the runway of Opa Locka Airport in a red, white and blue Cessna 337 Skymaster bearing the tail number of N2456S. Once airborne, Carlos went through the after takeoff checklist and leveled off at 1,000 feet. Then, with Pablo's assistance, they went through the usual pre-mission tasks of organizing the cockpit for the mission ahead. Once clear of the Opa Locka airspace and a couple of miles offshore, Carlos piloted the plane into a gentle, descending right-hand turn to head south at an altitude of 500 feet. As a matter of routine, Costa checked in with Miami Center, opened his flight plan and obtained the plane's assigned "squawk code" that was dialed into the aircraft's transponder.
This transponder code would broadcast continuously during the flight, allowing Miami Center and Havana Center as well as any other interested parties, such as the DEA and Customs, to track the aircraft easily on their radar, complete with altitude read-outs for each individual plane. In fact, once the planes were close enough offshore of Cuba, so long as the transponders were turned on, the Cuban air traffic controllers and military could also track the planes' identity, movements and altitudes with clarity.
A few minutes later, Command Pilot Mario de la Peña, "Seagull Mike," with the Vietnam veteran Armando Alejandre, Jr., beside him in the right seat, taxied their white and light blue Cessna 337 Skymaster onto the runway. They asked Opa Locka Tower for clearance to take off and, having gotten the usual go-ahead, they pushed their throttles forward and headed for the skies.
Once aloft, de la Peña called air traffic control and identified himself with his plane's tail number, N5485S, which was clearly stenciled on the Cessna 337 aircraft's twin tail booms. Once apprised of his assigned "squawk code," Mario made his way down south along the coast and descended to 500 feet and just minutes behind Carlos Costa.
These two planes were closely followed by "Seagull One." Jose Basulto flew with his observer, Arnaldo Iglesias, and the group's guests, the Iriondos, together aboard his Skymaster boldly emblazoned with his tail number N2506. Basulto's Cessna 337 was the most modern and finest of the group's planes. Being newer than the others, the plane was powered by advanced turbo engines and was equipped with newer avionics and a superior radio package, including more sophisticated navigation systems. Additionally, the plane featured a cockpit voice recorder that was integrated into the intercom system. N2506 was also had the sleekest appearance of the group's fleet of aircraft, being sky blue-gray with bright yellow accents on its wing tips, tail and propeller spinners.
Once airborne, "Seagull One" accelerated to join up with the other two aircraft and soon Sylvia Iriondo was looking over at Mario and Armando flying their Cessna in formation next to them. She smiled broadly as they waved excitedly at each other.
It was the last time she would see them alive.
Anatomy of a Murder
Finally airborne and with the Cessnas cockpits arranged for the day's work, the next step in the Brothers to the Rescue mission was complete the required communications with Havana Center when crossing of the so-called, "24 Parallel."
To many, the "24" is simply a demarcation line on a map that marks the U.S. Military's Air Defense Identification Zone (or ADIZ). For those in charge of protecting the United States it's the line that triggers an automatic intercept by the U.S. military should any unidentified aircraft be heading north towards the U.S.
For aircraft flying southward, the same line marks the beginning of the Havana FIR, or Flight Information Region. The FIR defines which country and air traffic control organization is responsible for monitoring and receiving information regarding any air traffic flying in their assigned zone. The FIR does not connote Cuban airspace vs. U.S. airspace -- in fact; Cuban airspace is limited to just 12 miles off of the coastline of Cuba.
On February 24, 1996, the 24 parallel marked the Brothers to the Rescue's passage into a modern day twilight zone. While the day had seemingly started off like so many other mission days of the past six years -- things were different, even if not obvious to the pilots and crews on board the three Skymaster airplanes.
As the three planes lifted from the runway at Opa Locka Airport, FAA air traffic controllers in Miami sent a routine message to their civilian counterparts in Havana notifying them of the Brothers departure and opening of their flight plans. Since Havana's air traffic controllers are part of Cuba's military air defense network, this explicit linkage yielded another alarming clue to what was about to take place.
The U.S. Military's radar and intelligence officers at NORAD were also notified and they too turned their attention to the Florida Straits -- and almost immediately noticed that the Cuban air defense system's five radar sites surrounding Havana had come alive, apparently tracking the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft.
The Brothers were flying a reverse mission route, one that historically had been followed when mission departure times ran late. This routing followed along the Florida Keys before heading southwest, allowing the flight crews to begin their search tracks from the search area's westernmost edge and flying eastbound before arriving at the Cay Sal Bank, then reversing course to fly another track westbound.
At 2:39 p.m. (14:39 in military time, which is used on the official transcript), Cuban air defense radars first detected the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft north of the 24 parallel, well inside U.S. airspace. Shortly thereafter, that word was relayed to one of the Cuban fighter squadrons, the Escuadrón de Caza Mixta of the UM 1779 Regimiento de Caza based at the Cuban Air Force base at San Antonio de los Baños.
The Cubans had already placed two MiG fighter interceptor aircraft especially on alert. Four minutes after the Brothers aircraft were first spotted on Cuban radar, while they were still in international airspace, these two MiG interceptors, a two seat MiG-29UB with the tail number of FAR-900 and a single seat MiG-23ML with the tail number of FAR-213, were moved to the runways with their jet engines running up.
As the MiGs prepared to take off, Jose Basulto was flying nearly due south towards the search area. Looking up, he was surprised to see passing overhead from the west to the east a U.S. Navy P-3 Orion at low altitude. In a later discussion, Basulto would estimate that the P-3 Orion was flying at perhaps an altitude of 2,000 feet and was north of the 24 parallel. This sighting was the first time that any of the pilots had ever seen a P-3 Orion in the area -- and years later, Basulto would come to the conclusion that the plane's presence was part of the observation programs put into place by the U.S. Government to monitor the Brothers flights that day.
As Basulto watched the P-3 Orion disappear into the eastern sky, the two MiGs were launched from within Cuba. It was 2:55 p.m. At that instant, according to U.S.-based radar, Jose Basulto's plane was still 50 nautical miles north of Cuba's 12-mile territorial limit and the other two Cessnas were slightly behind him, flying in a widely spread formation with several miles between each aircraft.
For the Brothers, the flight south was considered a search leg and all eyes were already focused on the water, looking for rafters below. On more than one prior mission, by searching the waves as they flew south, the group had "gotten lucky" early on, meaning they had found rafters before they began searching their first track lines along the Cuban coast in international airspace.
Unaware of the looming threat, the three Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were broadcasting their position via their transponders with their assigned codes. Based on these electronic signals, Havana Tower was already tracking their exact positions and altitudes. Air traffic controllers would also have known with confidence the identity of each aircraft based on the assigned "squawk codes," making it an easy matter to transmit attack vectors to the MiGs and put them in a position to commence a surprise attack on the three Brothers to the Rescue planes.
In the same minute that the Cuban Air Force launched the two MiGs, transcripts of Brothers to the Rescue's recorded cockpit conversations show communication between "Seagull One" (Jose Basulto) and "Seagull Mike" (Mario de le Peña) on radio frequency 122.75 MHz, a common frequency used for inter-plane communications.
In the following outtakes from the transcript, military time will be used -- thus, 14:55:01 would mean one second after 2:55 pm.
By coincidence, it was almost exactly one minute after the Cuban Air Force had launched its two MiG jet interceptors that the three Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were coming up to the point where they would announce their presence to Havana Center, Cuba's air traffic controllers. For the most part, the early portions of the transcript read like thousands of other missions the group flew.
14:55:54 Seagull One: "I say do it."
Seagull Mike: "Roger."
With this statement, Jose Basulto directed the other pilots to make their radio calls to announce themselves to Havana Center. These calls were routinely made in close sequence by each of the individual Brothers aircraft participating in the mission and were designed to comply with the legal requirements of crossing the upcoming ADIZ or 24 parallel.
Mario de la Peña, using his call sign was "Seagull Mike," would be the first to call the Cuban air traffic controllers on Havana Center's designated VHF radio frequency of 133.7.
14:56:00 Seagull Mike: "Havana Center, November 5485 Sierra."
14:56:05 Havana ACC: "5485 Sierra, Havana."
The voice of the Havana Center air traffic controller belonged to Ricardo Martínez, whose duties that day were managing civilian air traffic around and over Cuba. From his position in Havana Center, Ricardo Martínez was able to pass information and flight data directly to the Cuban military controllers.
14:56:08 Seagull Mike: "November 5485 Sierra, good day sir, we are crossing parallel 24 at this moment and will remain in this area for approximately five hours."
14:56:21 Havana ACC: "Received, check transponder code."
14:56:24 Seagull Mike: "85 Sierra with 1224."
14:56:36 Havana ACC: "In what area are you going to do your work?"
14:56:39 Seagull Mike: "Well, that information is in our flight plan."
14:56:42 Havana ACC: "I received that."
With this communication, Seagull Mike had just confirmed to the Cuban ATC and the Cuban Air Force that his aircraft was now approaching and bearing the assigned "squawk code" of 1224 and that it was one of the Brothers to the Rescue flights.
Twenty seconds later, Havana Center heard from Carlos Costa, call sign "Seagull Charlie," who, in the same type of conversation, verified his transponder code and told the air traffic controller he'd be crossing the 24 parallel in "five minutes."
Jose Basulto, "Seagull One," reported to Havana Center just seven seconds after Costa did. He made his intentions known in one call, "Good afternoon, Havana Center. Greetings from November 2506. Please, we should be crossing parallel 24 in five minutes and staying in your area for about three to four hours, transponder 1222 at five hundred feet or more."
Havana Center acknowledged the last of the Brothers identifying calls. Basulto continued his conversation by specifically identifying the search zone.
14:57:45 Seagull One: "Thanks... for your information, Havana Center, today our area of operation is to the north of Havana, so we will be in your area and in contact with you. Brothers to the Rescue and myself, president of the organization, Jose Basulto, send you warm greetings."
14:57:57 Havana ACC: "Received sir, we inform you that the area north of Havana is activated; you are taking a risk by flying south of twenty four."
The terminology used by Havana Center in making this response was routine, one that Havana Center had used on numerous earlier missions. As such, over the years, various members of the group had come up with interesting and unique ways of responding back to this typical, often recurring message from Havana Center. Sometimes they replied in the form of a greeting, other times by commenting on the weather, sometimes with a touch of pilot humor, and still other times with a slight political bent, as Jose Basulto would respond that day.
14:58:08 Seagull One: "We know that we are in danger each time we fly into the area south of the twenty four but we are ready to do so as free Cubans."
14:58:20 Havana ACC: "Thank you, we've copied you sir."
At 3:01 p.m. (15:01), the first of the Brothers to the Rescue planes crossed the 24 parallel, still forty miles north of Cuban airspace and well within their legal rights, flying in international airspace.
Based on U.S. radar logs, by the time that this exchange was completed, the two Cuban MiGs had already flown north of the coast and were off the coast of Havana scouring the skies at over 400 miles per hour. They were awaiting their final intercept headings from the ground controllers.
Seventeen minutes after notifying Havana Center, the three Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were southbound, approaching their respective turn points to commence the eastbound legs of the first of their search tracks. Their transponders were broadcasting their identity, altitude and exact position to the Cubans and they were close enough to be continuously tracked by Cuba's air defense radar systems.
Unbeknownst to the pilots and crews of the three Brothers' aircraft, who were focused on searching the water below for rafters; they flew almost directly beneath the two MiGs, which were circling above in search of their prey. Initially, both the Cuban MiGs and the Brothers to the Rescue aviators were distracted by two ships on the ocean below. One was quite large, Royal Caribbean's cruise ship, Majesty of the Seas, and the other was a small commercial fishing vessel called the Tri-Liner.
Little did the passengers and boat crews know but they were about to bear witnesses to murder, one not meant to be witnessed by a living soul.
15:17:27 Seagull Charlie: "One, Charlie."
With these words, Carlos was calling Basulto on the radio. Such crisp radio traffic employed a minimum number of words, a sign of professionalism and expertise among the pilots. Those two words, "One, Charlie," were verbal shorthand for "Calling Seagull One, this is Seagull Charlie."
15:17:29 Seagull One: "Hi Charlie."
15:17:31 Seagull Charlie: "You got that boat in front of you?"
15:17:33 Seagull One: "Ah, not yet about a mile.
15:17:35 Seagull Charlie: "It's your eleven o'clock, you've got a boat."
15:17:39 Seagull One: "Yeah, I am over flying the boat."
15:17:41 Seagull Charlie: "Okay, roger."
In the cockpit of N2506, Arnaldo Iglesias had control of the plane as Basulto filmed the cruise ship with his video camera. His camera also recorded the Havana skyline, a thin strip against the horizon, its buildings barely visible through a very slight haze. In the back of the plane, Sylvia and Andres Iriondo caught their first glimpse of "home," a country they had not seen for the more than thirty years since they had fled to the United States.
Iglesias continued south, which allowed a closer look at the island. As he passed the cruise ship, he was still over six miles outside of Cuba's airspace, in international airspace. Meanwhile, Carlos and Mario were waiting, maintaining a circling pattern to the north, so they could line up with Basulto and begin their first search track lines.
As the Brothers were talking about the Majesty of the Seas, so were the pilots of the two Cuban MiGs.
In the military ground control communications center, at least two controllers were engaged in the intercept -- to date, they have only been identified by their first names, Frank and Antonio.
Transcriptions of the recordings of the events vary somewhat, as do the translations. What follows is based on a reasoned combination of most important portions of the communications, as evidenced in the various translations and various sources for these communications between the Cuban aircraft and their ground controllers.
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "You have the target at 30. I have it in front of you."
MiG-23 (to Ground Control): "Right. What I have is a vessel."
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Roger, we are going to continue on a little further."
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "The vessel does not have a globe (balloon) on the outside?"
This question indicated the Cuban Military Ground Controller was suddenly concerned that the cruise ship might be one of the U.S. Government's aerostat radar balloon ships that were known to operate in the Straits of Florida. Clearly, it would have been very bad luck to have had the planned shootdown take place within sight of the U.S. Government's most powerful air search radar platform with observers on deck witnessing the event. What the Cubans didn't know was that the U.S. Government was already tracking their every move with multiple radars, aircraft and ground stations in accordance with an order that had been previously issued by the U.S. Military to expand radar coverage specifically for the flight of that day.
MiG-23 (to Ground Control): "Negative, nothing is seen on it."
Once the Cuban Military Ground Controller verified that the ship was not what they had feared, he reaffirmed the MiGs' positions relative to one another and ordered them to turn on their intercept systems.
Ground Control (to MiG-29): "This is for the 08, connect the UVD."
With these further words, the Ground Controller ordered the MiG-29 pilot to turn on a system called an Ultra Violet Detector (UVD), which used UV light frequency reception to track other aircraft. This system would be very effective in detecting and tracking the low flying Brothers to the Rescue aircraft.
Together, these statements by the Ground Controller demonstrate the amount of control exercised over the pilots by their government handlers, a system modeled on Soviet-era intercept tactics and procedures and originally taught to the Cuban military by Soviet military advisors. Knowing the Cessnas were unarmed, the aggressors had no concern about their own safety as they orbited in the skies over the Straits in search of the Brothers aircraft.
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "The target is north of Sante Fe at a distance of 25 kilometers." (About 15.5 miles)
MiG-23 (to Ground Control): "Roger, right now it's on a course of 180, at an altitude of 1,000." (meters)
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Come again?"
In making this report, the pilot had misstated the first Brothers to the Rescue aircraft's altitude, which was closer to 150 meters; he had meant to state his own altitude of 1,000 meters. Thus, the ground controllers had found the pilot's report somewhat confusing.
In the subsequent transcript of the intercept, the Cuban Air Force and Ground Controllers made only two references to ground landmarks, both of which indicated that the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were outside of Cuba's 12-mile airspace limit. In fact, it's quite clear from the transcript that the location of the Cessna aircraft was not important to the mission at hand.
The matter of the altitude confusion was quickly forgotten as the pilot in the single seat MiG-23 was distracted by the second boat, the commercial fishing vessel, Tri-Liner. He mentioned it briefly to controllers before finally finding the first of their prey. Seconds later, the MiG-29 pilot also spotted the first aircraft. Their excitement at spotting the airplane is palpable.
MiG-23 (to Ground Control): "It's a small aircraft, a small aircraft!"
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): "In sight, in sight!"
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): "It's white, white!"
They take just a few seconds describing the small, twin engine, twin-tailed, high winged, airplane for the Ground Controllers before being given authorization to pull the trigger, with the MiG-23 pilot appearing most hopeful to shoot down the first of the planes.
But it was not to be his glory.
The MiG-23 was ill-suited for the mission at hand, a fact that the Cuban Air Force had learned in previous intercept attempts over the past few years. They'd seen first hand that only the MiG-29 could turn tight enough, dive steep enough and pull out quickly enough to avoid hitting the water when trying to shoot down the sort of small, low altitude targets presented by the Brothers to the Rescue Cessna 337s -- unless they were caught unaware and were flying straight and level, which was exactly the situation at that moment over the Straits of Florida. The Cuban MiGs had achieved complete tactical surprise.
The MiG-23 was there chiefly as a backup aircraft. As several Cuban Air Force pilots who defected to the U.S. later commented, the second plane was probably assigned to shoot down the MiG-29 if it attempted to disobey orders or fly north to defect to the United States. Judging from the tone of voice used by the pilot of the MiG-29, there was little risk of that happening.
Ground Control (to MiG-29): "Authorized to destroy."
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): "I'm going to fire at it."
The MiG-29 pilot's voice betrayed his excitement at the upcoming kill; clearly, he was enjoying the experience and was an enthusiastic participant.
Ground Control (to MiG-29): "Authorized."
For a brief moment, the Cuban pilot lost sight of his target, which was the Skymaster flown by Carlos Costa -- "Seagull Charlie." However, from two miles above, the MiG-29's sophisticated avionics quickly reacquired Costa's Cessna.
To shoot the plane down, the MiG-29 pilot selected and armed a heat-seeking missile. The sound of the "missile tone" filled the headsets of the two pilots aboard the two-seat MiG-29UB, indicating that the missile was "tracking the target." This low growling noise could be heard clearly over the radio broadcasts as the MiG-29 pilot excitedly communicated his intentions to the Ground Controller.
Less than two seconds passed from the instant the pilot pressed the button launching the ten foot long Soviet-built R-73 air-to-air missile, until it tracked straight into "Seagull Charlie's" Cessna. The missile, a sophisticated and modern system that used infrared homing, blindsided the pilots, plowing straight in from above and behind. Carlos and Pablo never saw it coming.
The explosion of the warhead certainly killed two Brothers to the Rescue volunteers instantly. It was the air-to-air equivalent of using a bazooka for duck hunting.
At that instant, in a blink of the eye, the radar dot and transponder code of Seagull Charlie's aircraft vanished from Miami Center's and NORAD's radars, as well as from the radar screen of the DEA's aerostat balloon on Cudjoe Key, Florida. The last position recorded was exactly latitude 23:25.8 and longitude 82:25.6, well outside of Cuban territorial waters and in international airspace. The exact time of their death was 3:22 p.m.
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): "First launch."
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): Screaming. "Conjones!! Conjones!!!" (a slang term which, in this context, roughly translates to "We blew his balls off!!")
MiG-23 (to MiG-29): (Screaming, cheering)
MiG-29 (to MiG-23): "We took out his balls!"
MiG-23 (to MiG-29): "Wait, wait, look and see where it fell."
MiG-29 (to MiG-23): "Mark the place where we took it out."
MiG-29 (to all on the frequency): "We are above him (the crash site). This guy is not going to fuck with us ever again."
The crude nature of the language aside, this statement from the MiG pilots demonstrates that they clearly recognized that the aircraft they were hunting were from Brothers to the Rescue. While some of the other defecting Cuban Air Force pilots had stated in the past that they knew of and surprisingly even supported the mission of the group, which they described as a humanitarian lifesaving effort, this view was apparently not held by the two men aboard the MiG-29. In response to their statement, the ground controllers were extremely salutary.
Ground Control (to the two men in the MiG-29): "Congratulations to both of you."
In the moments afterwards, there is repeated transmission between Ground Controllers and the MiGs until they have assuredly "marked" the spot the plane was downed. Moments later, a Cuban SAR helicopter was "authorized and taking off," but instead of heading to the spot where the shootdown had occurred, the helicopter made a beeline for a point less than a half dozen miles off the coast by Havana -- far from being a mistake, this was almost certainly the first phase of a sophisticated attempt at deception that would follow in the days and weeks afterward.
At exactly the same time, completely unaware of the disaster unfolding around him, Jose Basulto was again reporting to Havana Center, speaking to the air traffic controllers.
Seagull One (to Havana Center): "Warm greetings. We report to you from twelve miles from Havana and proceed on our search and rescue course to the east. It's a beautiful day today and Havana looks just fine from up here. Cordial greetings to you and to all the people of Cuba from Brothers to the Rescue."
Havana Center, which was concurrently watching the attack on its radar screens, simply acknowledged Basulto's message by saying, "Havana received." The Havana Center ATC controller, Ricardo Martínez, kept silent about the attack already underway, of which he was very aware.
Basulto remarked on Havana's acknowledgement to his passengers on his in-plane intercom saying, "Before, they didn't even say that." It was a reference to the fact that for years, Havana Center would rarely say anything more than a curt "OK" when called over the radio. Often, they would say even less than that -- transmitting what some of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots called the "grunt of approval." Havana's blatant and common disregard for the norms and requirements of air traffic communication were almost legendary and the regular butt of jokes within the group, yet were also a constant reminder that they were dealing with a potentially hostile neighbor.
Thirty-six seconds later, as Havana Center continued to route commercial flights from United Airlines, US Airways, Cayman Air and a host of other Caribbean-bound flights both around Cuba and overhead the island, Basulto spotted a dark shadowy, swept wing aircraft streaking across the sky in the distance. The speed and shape of the dot meant only one thing to his sharp eyes -- it was a Cuban MiG jet fighter. His voice is heard again through the intercom in a frightened laugh, "They throw a MiG at us?" Seven seconds after that he said, "Barbarous, they are going to shoot...."
As Basulto said those words, Sylvia Iriondo pulled her rosary from her purse.
Arnaldo Iglesias was still in control of the plane while Basulto continued filming, as he often did on such trips. Now, in the momentary shock of seeing a MiG and trying to process his thoughts, Iglesias lost track of his position. He continued flying straight ahead, heading eastward -- and in the process, accidentally crossed into Cuban airspace, skirting across the northern edge where the territorial limit juts northward, right by Havana.
His transgression was unintentional. In other missions, when flying the southernmost search line, the planes would ease northward where the island projected farther north than the rest of the coastline that extended to Varadero. Doing this, they would stay clear of the 12 mile limit, which similarly jutted north as it followed the line of the coast. However, Arnaldo simply failed at that moment to follow the island's curvature and the airspace limit -- his mind was clearly on other things -- and he simply flew straight onward to the east, cutting straight across that portion of Cuban airspace while heading eastward.
Skimming past the edge of Cuba's 12 mile limit, Basulto's plane was within Cuban airspace for a total distance of 1.7 miles, much of the time no more than a few hundred yards "inside the line," running parallel to the coast, and heading eastbound (i.e., not toward Cuba). In all, Arnaldo had flown inside Cuban airspace for approximately forty-one seconds before realizing and correcting his error. This fact was documented conclusively in a subsequent ICAO report which was based on a review of the exact radar plots of all the aircraft involved.
Despite such conclusive evidence, the Cubans would later use Arnaldo's error to try to justify their attacks, making claim that the group had crossed into Cuban airspace on some sort of offensive mission and therefore had deserved to be shot down. However, the inadvertent crossing into Cuban airspace had taken place after the first of the Brothers to the Rescue planes had been shot down. Moreover, it occurred at exactly the time when the Cuban MiGs were actively tracking and preparing to shoot the second plane from the sky. That second plane was approximately 15 miles farther north of Cuba's 12 mile territorial limit -- or about 27 miles off of the coast of Cuba.
Ground Control (to MiG-29): "Stand by there circling above."
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): "Over the target?"
Ground Control (to MiG-29): "Correct."
At the same time, Mario, known as "Seagull Mike," also spotted the MiG as it flew past him quite low and fast. He immediately called Basulto to report the encounter, worried that perhaps Basulto had already been targeted.
15:22:32 Seagull Mike: "Seagull One, there's a MiG in the air, bogie in the air, where are you?
15:22:43 Seagull One: "The bogies are north of us at this time; they dropped a flare apparently to take reference from."
In the confusing moments that followed, Basulto clearly mistook the distant, descending fireball from Seagull Charlie as a flare much closer by. The full impact of the fact that one of the Brothers to the Rescue airplanes was already downed had not yet hit home.
Mario then tried to call Carlos to relay the information and make sure he was aware of the sudden appearance of the MiG jet fighter.
15:23:00 Seagull Mike: "Seagull Charlie, this is Seagull Mike."
Unaware that Seagull Charlie had already been shot down; Mario de la Peña attempted to contact him repeatedly.
15:23:20 Seagull Mike: "Charlie, Mike?"
He called again, ominously not receiving an answer. A few seconds passed before both he and Basulto came to the realization that there could be another reason why Seagull Charlie was not responding.
15:23:27 Seagull Mike: "One, have you heard from Charlie?"
15:23:29 Seagull One: "Negative."
It was at this instant that the Brothers to the Rescue pilots knew that something had gone terribly, horribly wrong. On a normal mission, communications between the aircraft were virtually continuous. For Seagull Charlie, one of the group's most experienced command pilots, to suddenly "drop off the net" was almost impossible to conceive -- it could only mean one thing, that he had been shot down.
Despite the rising tension they now all felt, the radio traffic between the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft remained calm, perhaps because these were pilots who had dealt with life and death situations regularly, often several times a week. Such experiences meant that they were not easily rattled. Their calm tone was in stark contrast to the screaming, unprofessional and disorganized communications of the Cuban MiG pilots. Yet the cacophony of traffic on the Cuban military frequencies belied the fact that the Cuban MiG pilot was a highly experienced (at least by Cuban standards), a lieutenant colonel and a veteran of 74 combat missions with the Cuban Air Force in Angola.
The MiGs circled back as ordered and within a few seconds, the other Cuban aircraft, a MiG-23, had spotted the fishing vessel, Tri-Liner, as the boat changed it's course toward the debris that its crew had watched hit the water behind them. One of the crew on the fishing boat had even seen the missile strike the plane and watched as it had suddenly turned into a small fireball that descended nearly vertically to the point of impact, only 200 to 400 meters from their boat, leaving a black smoke trail that hung heavily in the sky.
All that was left of Seagull Charlie's aircraft were a few floating bits and a pool of rapidly burning aviation fuel.
Ground Control again ordered the MiGs to stay on scene and to spot their next target, which was to be Seagull Mike in the Cessna 337 Skymaster numbered N5485S.
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): "I have another aircraft in sight."
MiG-23 (to Ground Control): "We have another aircraft."
MiG-23 (to Ground Control): "We have two aircraft."
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Correct, follow it, don't lose sight of the other target."
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): "We have the other aircraft in sight."
MiG-23 (to Ground Control): "It's in the area, in the area where it fell."
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Stay there."
MiG-29 (to MiG-23, surmised from context): "Comrade, it is in the area of the event, where the target went down. They are going to give us authorization."
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): "Listen, the SAR is not necessary. There is nothing left, nothing."
With this radio call, the MiG-29 pilot is advising his Cuban ground controllers that the search and rescue (SAR) helicopter that was originally intended was not necessary. Even from high above, it was apparent to the MiG-29 pilot that nobody could have survived their attack. The ground controllers concurred with a simple statement, saying "Correct."
For the Cubans, with the first target destroyed, the mission abruptly shifted to hunting the others. With the second aircraft now in sight near the crash site of the first, the ground controllers instructed the pilot to stay with that target.
Ground Controller (to MiG-29): "Follow the aircraft. You are going to stay over it."
MiG-29 (to Ground Controller): "We are over it."
Ground Controller (to MiG-29): "Correct."
Seconds later, the MiG-29 pilot is heard asking, "For what?" to his Ground Controller.
With this question, the MiG-29 pilot was apparently confused as to what the ground controller was ordering.
The Ground Controller is heard to say, "Prepare yourself, (garbled transmission)."
MiG-29 (to Ground Controller): "Is the other authorized?"
Ground Controller (to MiG-29): "Correct."
MiG-29 (broadcast to Ground Controller but meant as intra-plane communications): "Great, allow us to go, Alberto."
Later, this transmission also served as the first clue as to the identities of the Cuban pilots involved. Once again, the excitement of the MiG pilot is audible.
MiG-23 (to Ground Control): "Do you have it?"
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "This is the 020. You are authorized to destroy it."
For several years after the events, "020" was just another unidentified voice on the recordings. Few wondered at the individual's identity. Then, another Cuban Air Force pilot who had previously (and rather famously) defected, Major Orestes Lorenzo, reported that he knew, as all Cuban pilots knew, the identity of "020" -- that was the call sign of the head of the Cuban Air Force. For an official at that level to be involved on the radio that day betrayed two facts -- the high priority that the Cuban Government had put on the shootdown and its premeditated nature. The head of the Cuban Air Force would not have just happened to have been visiting a military ground control radio station at the time of the shootdown. It was too much of a coincidence to mean anything but that the shootdown was being managed at the highest levels.
In the skies off the Cuban coast, events were now rapidly unfolding. Those aboard the two surviving Brothers to the Rescue airplanes were drawing their conclusions from the evidence at hand.
15:27:21 Seagull One: "Do you see that smoke to my left?"
15:27:25 Seagull Mike: "I don't see anything now, I did see smoke."
15:27:30 Seagull One: "Err, do you see smoke below the MiG?"
15:27:33 Seagull Mike: "I didn't see it, see the MiG. I saw smoke and a flare."
15:27:37 Seagull One: "I saw the MiG, I saw smoke."
15:27:42 Seagull One: "I don't know if it was a flare."
With this last statement, Basulto had begun to piece together that what he had seen was more likely the fireball that marked the death of Carlos Costa and his copilot, Pablo Morales.
Simultaneously, passengers aboard the Carnival cruise ship, Majesty of the Seas, watched as de la Peña's Cessna made a sharp banked turn near the vicinity of a fishing boat that was clearly visible to them in the distance. This banking descent was consistent with the procedures Seagull Mike would have used to check out something of interest on the water's surface, such as a small boat or a raft or in this case, perhaps the oil slick left from the debris field of Carlos Costa's plane. It would also have been consistent with an evasive maneuver, turning to descend to the surface of the waves in a last bid to escape the hunting MiGs above.
To some of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots, Seagull Mike's last maneuver was a clear sign that he had meant to ditch the plane in an attempt to survive and escape what he may have surmised soon to be certain death. It was a maneuver that the pilots had discussed before, that if the Cubans ever "went crazy" and started shooting down unarmed civilian airplanes on a humanitarian mission, one way to escape would be to ditch the plane down into the water and dive out into the plane's life raft -- and then hope that the rescue would be made by the U.S. Coast Guard and not the Cubans themselves. The option was viable, since the Brother's flight crews were all well-equipped with maritime survival equipment.
Nobody will ever know just what Mario de la Peña was attempting to do in those last moments. He had certainly seen the fishing boat and perhaps considered ditching alongside. It might have worked, but the Cuban MiGs were already too close. Nonetheless, witnesses on the cruise reported that after first weaving back and forth, the Cessna Skymaster resumed a northerly course, apparently having decided to attempt to flee to the safety of U.S. airspace -- if only for a few moments before the flight would abruptly end.
Witnesses aboard both ships reported seeing a fighter plane in a sweeping turn descend and roll in behind Mario de la Peña's Cessna. Without so much as a warning pass, they witnessed the MiG fire a missile into the small plane. With the high wing of the Skymaster blocking their view above and behind, the crew aboard de la Peña's Cessna never even saw it coming -- though even if they had, they could not have reasonably evaded its impact.
Aboard the fishing boat Tri-Liner, the captain had been awakened from his bunk by the shouts of his excited crew. He arrived on deck in time to see the second plane, less than a mile distant from his position, burst into flames and fall to the sea.
The U.S. Coast Guard report from the debriefing of the crew on board the Majesty of the Seas described the scene dryly, "A military jet appeared high up on the Majesty's starboard side. The jet was described only as white in color. A missile was fired towards the civilian plane. It struck seconds later and the civilian plane exploded into tiny pieces. The largest of these pieces burned on the surface of the ocean for about a half minute before disappearing."
In seconds, the second plane, with two men aboard, had been obliterated by yet another missile. The force of the explosion had been enough that the two Brothers volunteers were killed instantly.
Far from being horrified at their deed of shooting down an unarmed civilian airplane, a plane they knew to be flying a humanitarian mission, the MiG pilots were instead celebrating with shouts of joy and excitement over the radio frequency.
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): Shouting. "The other is destroyed, the other is destroyed. Fatherland or death, coño, the other is down also."
Those familiar with Cuban history have related that the phrase, "Fatherland or death," is one that is commonly used by the most fanatical followers of the Cuban Revolution. The term, "coño," quite popular in Cuba, is a derogatory word.
Unaware of the radio chatter and celebrations going on between the MiGs and their ground controllers, Basulto waited forty-five seconds before he keyed his microphone again.
15:28:37 Seagull One: "Okay, we are looking to another flare, another ball of smoke."
15:28:45 Seagull One: "Charlie is that you?" he called into the clear air, possibly responding to static noise on the radio.
15:28:48 Seagull One: "Seagull Mike," he called into the clear air.
15:28:52 Seagull One: "Seagull Mike, Seagull One," he called again after a few seconds.
Hearing no response, suddenly, it was apparent to Basulto that he was alone. He knew now that the two "flares" were the fireballs that marked the death of the other aircraft. At that instant, all that was left of Seagull Mike's aircraft was what observers described as a "thin slick of oil" on the surface of the sea.
Miami Radar detected the disappearance of Seagull Mike at 3:28 p.m., the same moment Jose mentioned seeing "another flare, another ball of smoke."
Mario's last known position on Miami Radar was at latitude 23:30.3 and longitude 82:27.1 -- a position that likewise was well outside Cuba's 12 mile territorial limits.
15:29:15 Seagull One: "Seagull Mike, Seagull One," Basulto called again to confirm his worst fears.
15:29:40 Intercom on Seagull One: "Well, I guess we have to get the hell out of here. You hear me?"
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): "A boat is picking (things) up."
MiG-23 (to Ground Control): "The first."
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): "A boat is picking (things) up in (from) the first (aircraft shot down)."
In saying these words, the Cuban MiG pilot is referring to the fact that he was witnessing the crew of the Tri-Liner retrieving some of the aircraft wreckage from the surface of the sea. This communication from the MiG pilot also amounts to a de facto indication that the aircraft were shot down over international waters in that small boats (and certainly large cruise ships) do not normally trespass into Cuban waters without warranting a response.
MiG-29 (to Ground Control): "The one 12 (fuel remaining 1200 liters) returning."
MiG-29 (to MiG-23): "Be aware that there's a boat there. Be careful."
MiG-29 (to MiG-23): "There's a fishing boat."
The next communication to the Ground Controller is from the Cuban Air Force search and rescue (SAR) helicopter who radioed that he was "Leaving Baracoa." Simultaneously, the MiG-29 headed to an airfield in Guanabacoa, running low on fuel.
15:30:50 Seagull One: "Mike, One?"
There was no response to Basulto's final call. His voice was audibly stressed, but remained almost eerily calm in his next conclusion.
15:30:55 Intercom on Seagull One: "We are the next."
Basulto turned and flew north in a standard cruise, knowing that it would be at least an hour before he was back on the round in Opa Locka. He began a climb, noting that there were almost no clouds above -- it was a beautiful, sky blue day. There would be no hiding from any of the Cuban MiGs.
Years later, Basulto would say, "That day was CAVU (clear and visibility unlimited), the perfect day. Blue skies. There was only one single cloud on the entire flight home -- and it was maybe the size of my house. There was nothing to dodge in and out of; we were just in the open skies."
He chose a course that was a little bit to the northwest, so as to hopefully throw off the track of those who would have expected him to run straight north. Yet with Cuba's air defense radars at work, there was no hiding if the plane was up high. Had he instead dropped down to the height of the waves, he might have flown "over the horizon and under the radar," thus, out of the radar's line of sight limitations.
As they flew north, Basulto and his passengers knew that at least one Cuban MiG was out there -- somewhere. In a later interview with the authors, Basulto would sum up the experience and uncertainty of those stressful minutes, a time when he and his fellow passengers were sure that they were about to be shot down, but couldn't see who was behind them. He commented, "In the cockpit, we could only see down and ahead, because it is a Skymaster with the high wing. So we didn't know anything that was happening above us. We thought at any moment that we would not be there any more when they hit us. We didn't see anyone, so it was a mystery what was going on outside of the plane as we headed back north."
Unbeknownst to Basulto, the first two Cuban MiGs were already returning to their base, low on fuel. For the moment, he was out of danger. Yet even as Basulto fled northward, the Cuban Air Force realized that one Brothers to the Rescue aircraft still survived.
At 3:31 pm, another two Cuban Air Force MiGs were scrambled to complete the mission by shooting down the last plane.
Fourteen minutes later, transcripts show conversation between a MiG-23 and his Ground Controller identifying a "light blue Cessna 337." The hunt was on.
On board N2506, Basulto and his passengers were hoping to make it far enough north to escape into U.S. airspace and across the Air Defense Identification Zone line. Conversely, by flying higher, he remained on the screens of the Cuban ground based intercept radar.
However, Basulto had turned off his transponder. Clearly, it would have been a bad idea to continue to broadcast his location and altitude to the Cuban military radars. Now, with his transponder switched off, those radars were just "painting a primary," getting the reflective blip off of the radar energy bouncing back from the plane as it fled northward.
Without the transponder code, the Cuban military ground controllers could no longer be certain of the plane's identity or its altitude -- it was just a blip on the screen without the other information that the transponder would have been broadcasting. Because the radar controllers were continuously following him, they had little doubt which plane they were observing as it fled northward to the expected safety of U.S. airspace -- yet it was of great importance to be absolutely sure of their prey.
Basulto's plane was flying at approximately two and half nautical miles per minute -- which meant that by the time the Cuban MiGs had spotted him, he was already approximately halfway home. Finally, the plane crossed the ADIZ, also known as the SEADS "trigger line," and entered U.S. airspace. It was 3:46 p.m.
Once across the ADIZ at the "24", Basulto believed he had reached safety. He radioed Miami about the downing of the other men in the two planes and of the involvement of the Cuban MiGs.
Yet unbeknownst to Basulto, incredibly, despite crossing into U.S. airspace, the Cuban MiGs continued the hunt.
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "You have it five degrees to your left."
MiG-23 (to Ground Control): "Understood."
Four minutes later, at 3:50 p.m., Basulto's aircraft was below, ahead and "in sight" of the MiG-23 pilot as he lost and reacquired "the target."
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "At what altitude is the target?"
MiG-23 (to Ground Control): "More or less two thousand meters."
So far north, the interception had grown very dangerous for the MiG pilots. It was now apparent that success in dealing with the third plane would eluded the Cuban Air Force. Continuing to press northward would certainly result in a U.S. response -- the time to end the chase had arrived.
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Suspend the mission."
MiG-23 (to Ground Control): "Copied, suspend the mission."
The time was 3:53 p.m.
Ultimately, Basulto and the passengers on his airplane had just gotten incredibly lucky.
The full details of this last attempt to intercept and shoot down Basulto's plane, along with a full transcript of the MiG pilots as they hunted (and failed) in their mission, is related in the next chapter.
The shaken group on board the Cessna Skymaster, N2506, Jose Basulto, Arnaldo Iglesias, and the Iriondos, landed on U.S. soil at Opa Locka Airport at 5:08 p.m. Immediately on arrival, they were ushered into the U.S. Customs office where the four endured hours of questioning, which continued while the distraught relatives of the others awaited word in the Brothers to the Rescue hangar.
View to a Kill
Both the crew aboard the fishing vessel Tri-Liner and the passengers aboard the nearby cruise ship Majesty of the Seas were helpless witnesses as the two Brothers to the Rescue planes disintegrated in the skies above. Two black columns of smoke temporarily marked where the Brothers planes had fallen. They drifted slowly, dissipating in the wind over the calm, clear, azure waters of the Florida Straits as the sea swallowed the remains of the pilots.
For Captain Tim J. Reilly, the shootdown was a real-life waking nightmare. He had been asleep below decks on the Tri-Liner when he was rudely brought topside by his crewman's shouts. A plane had blown up. He ran up and out onto the deck, forgetting his glasses. Unable to see clearly, he quickly returned to the cabin to retrieve them. Once back on deck, Reilly realized the debris from the plane had plunged into the sea just a few hundred yards behind his boat.
According to an affidavit he filed a few months after the events of that day, entered under oath in a legal deposition taken on May 14, 1996, in Charleston, South Carolina, he said it only took a couple of minutes to get his boat to the oil slick left by the plane.
"There was little wreckage, but we did notice a one and a half (1.5) foot square orange float (box) with green dye or antifreeze coming out of it and a long yellow rope going down."
This green dye, erroneously called "antifreeze" by Captain Reilly, would have been the stain left on the sea's surface from the fluorescent dye markers that the Brothers commonly used to help mark the positions of rafts they had spotted. The floating box he referred to was descriptively similar to the kind the Brothers used to store and keep track of airdrop supplies, such as smoke canisters, streamer tape, flares, mirrors, rope, and cyalume chemical glow sticks.
The fishing vessel's master continued, "We waited at the site about ten minutes but nothing else came to the surface. At that point, we started north again. I then noticed a second plane, which was white with a big belly and two engines."
"The second plane was circling in front of us from starboard (right) to port (left), when a jet came up behind it and shot a missile. I saw the missile blow out the second plane. It exploded in a large fireball before it hit the water. After it hit the water, I witnessed a wide fire blazing on the water. The jet that fired the missile then disappeared. There was a white cruise ship heading west at the time the second plane was fired on and the second plane hit about three to five miles in front of the cruise ship."
Tim Reilly's affidavit ends with his solemn reasoning for not looking for the wreckage from the second plane. "First, we assumed these were Navy maneuvers. Second, after having witnessed the plane blow up we did not think there would be much wreckage left."
Years later, in 2001, during the trial of five men accused of being Cuban spies, men who it was suspected had helped orchestrate the shootdown; the testimony of other witnesses at the trial eerily echoed those same events, seen from a perspective several miles a way -- from the decks of the cruise ship, Majesty of the Seas.
As quoted in an article from the Miami Herald on January 31, 2001, the testimony First Officer Bjorn Johansen related what he saw from the vantage point of the bridge of his regal cruise ship.
While standing watch, he'd personally witnessed the shootdown of both planes, as did many passengers aboard the luxury liner. His description of the downing of the second plane, Seagull Mike, which was northbound at the time it was hit, says it all: "The [Cessna] plane was consumed by fire and many pieces fell into the sea. There were no warning shots. There was no maneuver [by the MiG] other than lining up for a direct hit on that plane."
His words were similarly echoed from another source, a highly experienced U.S. Customs multi-rated radar operator, based at March AFB in California. Tucked far away in a darkened room, Major Jeffery Houlihan sat staring at his bank of radar display screens. From this vantage point, he'd been watching events unfold on his displays that were linked to radar sites along the entire length of the southern U.S. border.
As events unfolded, Major Houlihan concluded that what was happening over the Straits was unique. He printed screen shot after screen shot from his radar display -- capturing and preserving key data from the critical fifty minute period in which the Cuban MiGs stalked and ultimately shot down the Brothers to the Rescue planes. Later, he would call what he saw that day "an unprovoked attack."
Houlihan is also the man who made the sole "911 call" to Tyndall AFB, where his urgent warning fell upon deaf ears. To this day, there are many who wonder why, of all those watching the radar screens, only Major Houlihan thought to make a "911" call for help.
Five months after the shootdown, it was Major Houlihan's compelling and resolute testimony on June 27, 1996, before the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) that shed the first light of truth on the attack, as seen literally from above.
On February 24, 1996, Major Houlihan had been standing watch at March Air Force Base in Riverside, California. His post was in the Domestic Air Interdiction Coordination Center, or DAICC. There, he was a supervisor overseeing the radar controllers who kept tabs on the area from the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida, to the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico and along the southwest border shared with Mexico, all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Houlihan's unprecedented view of the events was the result of a rather exceptional request -- on February 24, 1996, the U.S. Government had ordered the vast radar resources of the United States to pay special attention to the Straits of Florida between Key West and Cuba. It seemed to Houlihan as if Washington was expecting something unusual.
Among those resources assigned to the task was a unique asset: the B-94 Aerostat Balloon on Cudjoe Key, based not far from Key West. The Aerostat was a tethered blimp that could be reeled out to an altitude of over 10,000 feet. It carried aloft a radar system that, in the words of one operator (and perhaps a bit of an overstatement), had such resolution that it could track a beer can afloat on the waves halfway to Cuba.
By strange coincidence, Major Houlihan was also an Air Force officer who had previously been assigned to NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain. In his NTSB testimony, when asked about his work there, he described his duties as a radar controller who "used fighter aircraft to perform intercepts on unknown aircraft coming into the United States. I was the one who directed them in to trail of the unknown aircraft." In this context, he was speaking of U.S. military interceptors when he spoke of "them."
He testified that his past experience working as a U.S. Air Force officer had included "watching for high flying aircraft, fast moving targets heading into the United States, a threat to the national defense." Therefore, based on this background and experience, the former NORAD radar controller had a heightened awareness of what was happening.
Major Houlihan noted, "A typical interception by the Air Force would be any time we picked up a target that we didn't know who it was, generally that target would be between 250 and 500 knots in speed, heading into the United States."
"We would launch interceptor aircraft out of one of the alert bases in the southwestern United States. I would take control of those aircraft and direct them to a stern intercept, meaning coming up behind the target aircraft."
"They [U.S. military jets] would pull in close, do a visual identification of the aircraft and then we'd take whatever action is necessary after that."
On February 24, 1996, Houlihan watched knowingly as the fast moving Cuban MiGs scoured the skies in search of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. He recognized exactly what was about to transpire.
In working for the Customs Service, Major Houlihan would print a screen, "every time I see something that I think is important, so that I can keep a complete record of exactly what happened." That day he printed an unprecedented number of screens -- fourteen in all.
When asked in the NTSB hearing why he printed so many of the radar screens in this particular case, Houlihan responded, "Well, initially, we printed the screens because it was a request from the FAA. They asked -- they know what our radar coverage is like down there."
"They know our ability to print screens, so they had requested that we take a picture or two of the Brothers to the Rescue as they flew that day."
"As the incident progressed -- normally, I simply would have taken one or two, but as the incident progressed and I saw what was going on, I felt that it was going to be something extremely important later, so I just started taking prints every time I saw something change."
Later in his testimony, Houlihan answered questions regarding any other logs he made on February 24. He indicated that he also kept "track logs," which named the two aircraft shot down in the incident, the type of aircraft, where the flight originated, "Opa Locka, Florida," and where it ended, "north of the Cuban ADIZ." The Cuban ADIZ is the equivalent of the American Air Defense Identification Zone; in other words, he meant that the shootdowns had occurred outside of the northern edge of Cuba's 12 mile airspace limit.
When asked why one particular log had been created, which had been marked for the court as "A-12," Major Houlihan responded by saying, "We wanted to have a record. My concern at the time was not so much having a record for court. We never thought it would end up anything like that. My concern at the time was to have some proof of what I saw as cold blooded murder. I wanted to put down exactly what I saw." (Emphasis has been added in italics.)
There were approximately eight detection system specialists working for Major Houlihan that day, including National Guard Major John Robinson, a trainee at the DAICC, Tracy Stebbins, and Ronald Bechtold, all of whom made concurring entries into the computer's log system.
The DAICC team was using long-range radar sites based in Tamiami and Key West, Florida, as well as the powerful radar on the Aerostat blimp that was based on Cudjoe Key.
In some of the most chilling testimony on record, Major Houlihan described what they witnessed.
"In very general terms, what we saw was three general aviation aircraft with squawks that were assigned to BTTR [Brothers to the Rescue] head southbound from Florida; go down towards the Cuban Air Defense Identification Zone."
"Prior to them getting in real close to the Cuban ADIZ, I saw a Cuban -- what I thought were Cuban MiGs appearing off the coast of Cuba. I watched one of the BTTR aircraft penetrate the Cuban ADIZ, initially by about one nautical mile and then up to three nautical miles. He headed eastbound."
The aircraft about which Major Houlihan was referring is N2506, piloted by Jose Basulto, who was in fact in direct communication with Havana by radio at the time of his accidental incursion. Neither mention nor warning was made of the MiGs overhead or his incurrence into the Cuban ADIZ by the Havana air traffic controller, an incursion which later analysis would reveal had lasted only 41 seconds.
"At that time, the other BTTR aircraft stayed outside the Cuban ADIZ. I then saw the Cuban MiGs shoot down one of the BTTR aircraft about three nautical miles outside the Cuban ADIZ."
"The first BTTR aircraft that penetrated the Cuban ADIZ, then exited the ADIZ headed northbound. I then saw another Cuban MiG shoot down the second BTTR aircraft approximately between ten and twelve miles north of the Cuban ADIZ. And then saw the surviving Brothers to the Rescue aircraft continue to Opa Locka."
It is notable that Major Houlihan's recollection does not jive with the timeline researched by the drafters of the ICAO report, which indicated that the first Brothers to the Rescue aircraft was shot down before Basulto's aircraft accidentally trespassed into Cuban airspace. However, even if Basulto's aircraft had crossed into Cuba airspace beforehand, that would not have been a justification to shoot down the other two aircraft, nor to even shoot down Basulto's plane -- rather, it is standard practice to intercept the intruder and escort them to an airfield. Interception procedures and an explicit prohibition of shooting down civilian aircraft are well-defined in international law and by treaty -- which is widely recognized and respected even by most nations that are not signatories. The proper procedure would have been to intercept the aircraft and order them to land. Typically, this would be accomplished by the interceptor plane flying alongside and lowering its landing gear. Radio communications would be attempted as well -- and it is notable that even as the Cuban MiGs attacked, Havana was in regular radio contact with the Brothers to the Rescue pilots. After landing, potentially the pilots would be imprisoned and interrogated before being released, often having their plane confiscated and paying steep fines.
Houlihan's testimony continued to describe the aircraft's altitude and air speed until he was specifically asked a second time as to why they were monitoring the group's flight that particular day. He responded again that it was "by an FAA request."
His testimony also reiterated that the Brothers to the Rescue planes were following a rather typical flight path, one that he had seen in numerous previous missions. Houlihan noted, "In my experience from the past, what I've seen is that they'll come down from the Florida Keys area, from Opa Locka is where they originate, and start search grid patterns just north of the Cuban coast looking for rafters, for people attempting to escape Cuba is my understanding."
Houlihan was also quick to point out in his testimony that, "Just north would mean well north of the Cuban coast... outside the Cuban ADIZ, south of the 24 parallel, but definitely outside the ADIZ."
According to Houlihan, it was the appearance of a Cuban MiG taking off from an airbase near Havana that got his attention that day. He watched as they flew north and closed on the Brothers to the Rescue planes. In his testimony before the court, he described the screen prints that were entered into evidence by explaining, "It shows one Cuban interceptor aircraft directly overhead all three of the BTTR aircraft. It appears to be, in my experience of fighter tactics and such, that what he appears to be doing is making a high pass in an attempt to identify the aircraft."
When asked how far from the Cuban ADIZ the three Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were while being overflown, Houlihan responded, "Approximately twelve miles." In other words, by Major Houlihan's recollection, the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were approximately 12 miles beyond the 12 mile limit of Cuban airspace -- i.e., flying in international airspace approximately 24 miles off the Cuban coast. His testimony would serve as the first official verification of the fact that the Brothers to the Rescue airplanes were outside of Cuban airspace when they were shot down -- which starkly contrasted with the Cuban Government's own claim that the Brothers aircraft had penetrated their airspace and were therefore supposedly justifiably shot down (even though such an act, by international standards, was hardly a justification).
Houlihan then defended his taking of certain screen prints telling the court, "I took the picture because of the Cuban MiGs. I was concerned. I had never seen Cuban MiGs out there flying before and to see this, it struck my attention; I was worried about what was going on. I had certainly never seen them come outside their ADIZ."
"In fact, I'd flat never seen them out flying before. They [The Cubans] generally have a lot of problems providing fuel, from what I've been told, and I've never, in the two years we've been watching that area, seen them fly at all."
"To see two up at the same time, to see them coming directly at the BTTR aircraft and by that, northbound towards the United States, concerned me. My major concern was with this particular print was the fact that there's a Cuban MiG directly in between Mr. Basulto's aircraft and the aircraft squawking 1223 just north of it."
Houlihan next estimated that the MiGs were flying at a speed of "516 knots" based on indicators provided on another screen print that was entered into evidence.
In the courtroom, the judge queried Major Houlihan, "How far away would you say that was from 1223?" In asking this question, the judge was referring to the MiG's position in reference to the aircraft flown by Carlos Costa and Pablo Morales, whose plane was broadcasting a transponder code of 1223.
"From 1223?" the radar operator asks, verifying the judge's question before replying, "1223 is in this -- in my opinion, in this picture, is gone. He [The Cuban MiG] has just overflown where the aircraft was and is continuing the -- the MiG itself is continuing a left turn."
"Also, as far as relevance in this, it's my opinion, that as he did so, he crossed directly over the top of where the aircraft squawking 1224 was. This gave him his visual reference to the target. That allowed him to be able to come back around and shoot him down." By referring to the 1224, Houlihan cited the transponder code of the plane piloted by Mario de la Peña and Armando Alejandre, Jr.
When asked to qualify his last statement to the court, Houlihan delivered his own cold belief, "In my opinion, from what I saw, I believe the same MiG shot both aircraft down."
The judge asked Houlihan to further support his understanding that one of the two MiGs had operated as the sole aggressor.
"Tactically after having read the transcript and I have read the transcript of what the Cuban pilots were saying, and from watching what happened, I think he was the only one that had any opportunity."
"They appear to be incredibly incompetent in the way they were handling the entire thing. Beyond the fact they were murdering innocent people in international airspace, their tactics stink."
Subsequently, in cross-examination by the defense attorney, Major Houlihan was asked again about his "911" phone call to the Southeast Air Defense, or SEADS.
Houlihan's computer log, provided as evidence to the court, contained a text reference, labeled 2017, that relates to a screen print made at the same time as the call. Houlihan noted that he spoke to the Senior Director Technician at the Air Defense Facility.
When asked what he said, Houlihan jokingly responded, "I can recall almost specifically the words I used, if you prefer to hear those. I did keep it relatively clean." He then continued, "What I told him was do you see the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft? The Senior Director Technician replied yes, that he did."
"I said do you know what is going on with them today and he said yes, we've been briefed. And then I said do you see that primary aircraft, 500 knot primary and he [Senior Director Technician] said yes, we see it."
"I said well, it looks like a MiG-23 to me heading directly towards the United States. I think that's important. And the [Senior Director Technician] responded yes, we're handling it, don't worry."
Houlihan was then asked by the questioning attorney, "And did you come to learn what he did to handle it or what was done to handle it?"
The tone in his testimony took that of a seasoned veteran as he related, "I have specific knowledge from watching the area at the time that no interceptor aircraft showed up."
Further, he reiterated, "No American interceptor aircraft showed up."
Far from "handling it," to borrow the unfortunate terminology of the Senior Director Technician at Tyndall AFB, exactly the opposite had happened.
In a subsequent military report of the failure of the U.S. air defense network to adequately respond that day, it was noted that the U.S. Air Force F-15 Eagle fighters at Homestead AFB not only did not launch, but were taken down from battle stations alert from 3:20 p.m. until 3:35 p.m., the exact period that included both shootdowns.
From Houlihan's perspective, all he knew was that someone at Tyndall AFB, a then unidentified military officer with the title of Senior Director Technician, had said they were "handling it," and yet nothing had happened.
In the years after those unfortunate events, many fingered that unidentified officer as the point man in a conspiracy that they felt had to originate from higher up in the chain of command. Others felt that there was complicity or, at the very least, a cover-up of Watergate proportions that could be traced as high as the Oval Office, to the hand of the Commander in Chief, the then President of the United States, Bill Clinton. More likely, however, the SD Technician was but the "leading edge" of a failure that ultimately brought to light a previously unrecognized fallibility in the U.S. air defense system.
Afterwards, several members of Congress felt that the performance of NORAD and SEADS deserved further examination. The House International Relations Committee (HIRC) called a hearing to gather and review additional information about what happened that day and its broader implications regarding U.S. security.
The transcript of the hearing focused at one point on the identity of the SD Technician. "A review of the Customs telephone transcript indicates the call was taken by the Senior Director Technician," the transcript notes when the issue is first addressed. "We do not know which SD Technician took the call." Stunningly, the transcript also notes that from a SEADS "perspective," Major Houlihan's phone call alerting them to MiGs that appeared to heading towards the United States was considered "routine."
Not willing to let the matter drop, Congressman Dan Burton questioned Ms. Maria Fernandez, a Clinton Administration appointee called as a witness by the Congress. Ms. Fernandez was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Inter-American Affairs), a fairly senior level political position at the Pentagon that falls within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. She was the Department's senior official in charge of day-to-day Defense Department policies and programs for all of Latin America and the Caribbean, including Cuba. The DoD's top Cuban policy desk officer reported directly to her.
In her testimony, Ms. Fernandez revealed that the Southeast District watch officer who took the call that day was Colonel Frank Willy, a U.S. Air Force officer. Ms. Fernandez also dryly noted that Col. Willy had since retired. The circumstances of his retirement were not discussed and remain unclear -- it could have been that, having reached the end of his military career, Col. Willy had simply retired in accordance with his own plans. Equally, it could have been that the U.S. Military simply expected that he would quietly retire after having been involved in a failure of such extraordinary proportions that it had cost the lives of American citizens. Regardless, by identifying the officer to the Congress, Ms. Fernandez was casting blame -- perhaps without regard to whether it was deserved. Sadly, for the writing of this book, multiple attempts to locate and question Col. Willy by the authors have been unsuccessful. We can only conclude that his service in the USAF was exemplary and that his role in the events of that day was relatively minor, if unfortunate.
By inference, the fact that Ms. Fernandez knew this level of detail reveals that the political leadership of the Department of Defense had become very familiar with the events of that day. The briefings Ms. Fernandez must have received in advance of the hearing were obviously of excellent quality and quite detailed, including even the name of the individual involved at Tyndall AFB.
However, none of this was known to Major Houlihan the day he was testifying in court regarding the shootdown -- all he knew was that from his desk at the Customs Service at March AFB, he had made a call to the proper authorities at Tyndall AFB who, as part of the NORAD network, had clear responsibility to coordinate an intercept. That no intercept took place was as much a mystery to him as to anyone else familiar with the air defense system that is tasked with protecting America from foreign aggression. Notably, if ever there was a patent definition of foreign aggression, Cuban MiGs hunting and killing innocent American civilians just off the U.S. coast and even inside the U.S. ADIZ would be it.
However, one should also consider that the assigned role of the USAF and of NORTHCOM was the protection of the United States, not necessarily the direct defense of a handful of its citizens. With that said, however, it could also be argued that few in the military would elect to stand idly by while a foreign air force attacked American citizens.
Houlihan's testimony continued with questions about response times for fighter jets taking off from Homestead AFB and from the Naval Air Station at Boca Chica, near Key West, to the area where the shootdown had occurred. He noted that, "Depending on alert status of the aircraft at either location, they could have been there -- out of Key West, they could have been there in five minutes."
In further questioning, Major Houlihan qualified his statement, saying, "If they were on battle stations, meaning sitting on the end of the runway with their engines running, they should have been off the ground in less than two minutes. Out of Key West, off the ground in less than two minutes, they should have been in the area in less than five."
Major Houlihan's testimony also described the area that runs roughly along the 24 parallel, indicating specific warning lines the military uses to trigger a response. He explained to the court that the area is a "U.S. Military designated launch area which, should any targets appear in that position heading towards the United States, the United States Military has told me specifically that anything that appears to be in that area heading towards the U.S, they are going to launch immediately without waiting the normal identification process."
Houlihan continued, "It's, if I might use a colloquialism, in my own facility, we refer to it as the Southeast Air Defense's Cone of Paranoia."
More formally, the "Standard Operating Procedures" (SOP) at SEADS defines this line as the "trigger line." The "trigger line" and SOP were tested three hours earlier that day when fighter jets scrambled from Homestead AFB, south of Miami, to respond to the appearance of Cuban MiGs patrolling off the coastline of Havana, far south of the US ADIZ. Once the Cuban ground controllers observed the U.S. response on their radar, they immediately recalled their MiGs. These earlier U.S. interceptors had returned to their base at Homestead AFB, landing at 1:06 p.m. No disclosure of this earlier U.S. response was included in U.S. Government press briefings on the events that took place on the same day.
However, the military's analysis and report were not the only assessment of events of that day. ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization, to which the Federal Aviation Administration is a member, made its own investigation and report.
The ICAO report documents an earlier U.S. radar record of "Cuban military aircraft activity north of Havana between 12:15 and 12:45 hours." This timing corresponds to the expected arrival of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft based on the initial flight plan filed that day by Carlos Costa, but which was never activated.
The takeoff time of the Cuban MiGs earlier in the day forms strong, if still circumstantial evidence of a premeditated act on the part of the Cuban Air Force. It also lends some credence to at least one aspect of the U.S. military's own report of a "communications mix-up" on the matter. Had there been some sort of conspiracy or complicity on the part of the U.S. military with the Cubans in the shootdown, presumably, they would not have launched an interception flight earlier in the morning against the first pair of Cuban MiGs.
Additionally, it also brings into question other conclusions reached in the military report, including that the second flight of Cuban MiGs, which had actually downed the Brothers to the Rescue planes, had not met SEADS and NORAD scramble criteria. Somehow, the earlier flight, which was virtually identical in profile to the later flight, had warranted a scramble order while the subsequent shootdown somehow did not. Further, the last pair of MiGs had even come north of the ADIZ -- and somehow this still had not caused the launch of U.S. aircraft. The claim that the Cuban MiGs had not met scramble criteria was little more than a whitewash -- in actual fact, the U.S. Military's response had been confused and disoriented. Much of what had happened had not been handled in accordance with SOP.
These facts are further supported by Major Houlihan's testimony, which continued, "Throughout that entire area, the Southeast Air Defense has made it very clear to me in briefings at the Southeast Air Defense, that anything that pops up inside that area; they will launch their interceptor aircraft immediately. Their assumption being that anything that pops up in that area heading towards the United States is coming out of Cuba."
Based on the unclassified summary of the report that has been released to the public, the U.S. military's report apparently ignores everything that transpired after the two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft had been shot down and the Cuban MiG fighters had turned to return to their base, low on fuel. At that point, yet another pair of Cuban MiGs had been launched and had chased Basulto's plane northward -- and based on the evidence available, it would appear that these last two MiGs even crossed the 24 parallel (the U.S. ADIZ) heading north while on the hunt, yet still no USAF aircraft were launched.
Perhaps the initial tasking to undertake the study and report only concerned the issues of why the U.S. military did not and could not save the two planes that were shot down. Of course, another far more likely explanation would be that the military's report, in its classified portions, fully detailed the multiple failures in the nation's air defense capabilities that lead a final failure to launch any defensive aircraft against the Cubans, even though they were demonstrably hostile and aggressively hunting a U.S. registered private aircraft. It is also clear that those portions of the military's report that reveal shortcomings in the U.S. air defense system should remain classified insomuch as they could be exploited by the enemies of the United States. Others, however, believe that the rest of the report remains classified to cover up the events that day.
The failure of the U.S. air defense response that day is all the more egregious upon review of the timing of the rest of the events that day. At 3:31 p.m., the Cubans launched their last pair of MiGs to chase Basulto's plane northward toward the Florida Keys. The aircraft were both of the MiG-23ML type, and carried the tail numbers, FAR-242 and FAR-245.
Four minutes later, at 3:35 p.m., the NORAD system came back online. With the "communications mix-up" rectified, USAF's F-15 fighters were returned to battle stations at Homestead AFB, ready for immediate scramble against any threats to the U.S. With the USAF's F-15 fighters now back on battle stations, their response time was decreased from 5-8 minutes to just 2-3 minutes -- in other words, even with the "communications mix-up," the F-15s would have been able to take off even before being ordered back to battle stations -- except that the order to launch was never given.
The extraordinary failure of the U.S. air defense system was summed up by Congressman Burton, who would later state, "For 46 minutes, MiGs were heading towards the United States, and not one F-16 was sent up. There's a serious breach of security that needs to be explained by the U.S. Air Force, by the Defense Department, and we need to find out why all this happened."
Years later, in an interview with Cristina Khuly, whose uncle, Armando Alejandre, Jr., was one of those who died that day, Major Houlihan recalled, "Later on, in personal conversations with people who were associated with the air defense group, I said, 'Look, I know you guys, I know fighter pilots, I know you wanted to go after those Cuban interceptors -- you live for this opportunity' -- and, and the comment I got back was, 'Yeah, we did want to go, in fact the boss was pounding, literally pounding on the console, asking for permission to launch.'"
Even then, no USAF aircraft were released -- despite that a third pair of Cuban MiGs was speeding northward toward "a radar contact" that they hoped would be the third Brothers to the Rescue airplane and their last target for the day. This final flight of Cuban fighters would have certainly been under the watchful eye of the U.S. military radar systems, which would have been tracking them as they headed north toward the SEADS "trigger line."
The transcripts of the communications between the MiG pilots and their ground controllers leave no doubt that their mission was to shoot down the third and last Brothers to the Rescue aircraft, "Seagull One," Jose Basulto's light blue and yellow Cessna Skymaster, N2506.
Aboard their F-15 Eagle jet fighters, arguably one of the finest air superiority planes in the world today, the pilots sat in the hot sun in their cockpits, helplessly awaiting an order to launch that never came.
Incredibly, based on the ICAO study and report, even as the NORAD radar systems tracked them, this third and final pair of Cuban MiGs crossed the U.S. ADIZ and SEADS "trigger line," the 24 parallel. Based on established military policies, such trespass into U.S. airspace mandated an automatic scramble of U.S. interceptors -- it was seen as critical to the defense of the United States. Yet still, the American F-15 fighter jets remained idle at the end of the runway at Homestead AFB, engines running, ready for takeoff.
In their radio communications, the pilots on these last two Cuban MiGs, well north of Cuba, were growing increasingly concerned about their position, so close to the United States. At any moment, they would have expected to see the warning lights in their cockpit light up, signaling a lock-on from American fighters that even they knew should have been speeding southward to shoot them out of the sky.
Just minutes off the coastline of the United States, they were desperately searching for Seagull One. Their fears of being intercepted by the USAF, however, were unfounded. To conspiracy theorists, it was almost as if the U.S. Air Defense system was giving the Cubans a final chance to finish the job and leave no survivors from Brothers to the Rescue -- and presumably, no witnesses.
More likely, however, the failure of the air defense system was far more profound than any public figure has yet been willing to admit. In short, the system failed -- repeatedly and horrifically. Such a failure, if admitted, would broadcast to the world that there were gaps in the U.S. air defense network -- and for that reason alone, the full story about the failure of the system that day would be classified and kept under wraps, even as the system itself would evaluate and learn from the failure, fixing the problems for the future. However, with the passage of so many years, at this point, there is little left to hide.
Three times the Cuban MiG pilots spotted Basulto's plane and looped around to prepare for an attack in the clear blue skies above the Straits of Florida. Three times they circled back to confirm the target's identity and get authorization to shoot.
To place Major Houlihan's testimony in a strong context, it is worth reviewing the communications between the last pair of MiG pilots and their ground controller, which were submitted as evidence in the court. These transcripts were subsequently translated by Sonny Dorrbecker of the Cuban American Pilots Association (CAPA), a native speaker of Cuban Spanish who, being a highly skilled commercial pilot, is also very familiar with aviation terminology and himself is a former search and rescue pilot. The transcript reveals the stress and excitement of the moment, as well as the astonishing failure of the MiG pilots to intercept and destroy Basulto's plane -- a failure so astonishing that some have wondered if the last pair of Cuban pilots, perhaps holding higher morals, were purposefully letting the third plane escape.
At 3:49 p.m., the Cuban MiGs made their first pass over the top of Basulto's plane, which was working its way north to the presumed safety of the Florida Keys and U.S. airspace.
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Do you have the objective in sight?"
MiG-23 #1 (to Ground Control): "I have it below and in front."
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Work it."
MiG-23 #1 (to MiG-23 #2): "He is turning left."
MiG-23 #2 (to MiG-23 #1): "There, take off bank. Wait, is that when we get near like this. Well, he's maneuvering."
MiG-23 #1 (to MiG-23 #2): "You have him?"
MiG-23 #2 (to MiG-23 #1): "No and you? (Pause) Let me intercept him first, but he is maneuvering. Well, there, like that."
Two minutes had ticked by and the Cuban MiGs were still no closer to shooting down Basulto's plane, even if they had flown five miles closer to the United States, almost within sight of the Naval Air Station at Boca Chica. Despite circling desperately back, they lost sight of Basulto's plane and apparently were struggling to reacquire it despite the clear skies just south of the Florida Keys. They asked the ground controller for a heading based on the Cuban ground-based radar returns. As the clock rolled over to 3:51 p.m, the MiG pilots again asked for vectors to intercept Basulto's plane.
MiG-23 #1 (to Ground Control): "Give me the position."
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "In front (of you)."
MiG-23 #1 (to Ground Control): "Well, I'm going, give me headings."
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Correct, the objective is behind you now, to your left, bearing 180. (Pause) No, he's not behind."
Somehow, they must have flown directly overhead Basulto's plane and yet completely missed seeing it, which the ground controller had just dutifully reported.
The confusion of the intercept was growing increasingly evident to all of those involved. Complicating the hunt, the MiG-23's radar system is not as sophisticated and capable as that of the MiG-29 aircraft that had shot down the two planes earlier -- the MiG pilots were attempting the equivalent of looking around the sky through a soda straw, their narrow radar scanning cone virtually useless in finding their target unless given a very precise, longer range intercept heading vectors. Even with such vectors, however, once they had the Cessna in sight, at speeds that were close to 400 mph, they had little time to execute an attack. Still, for trained fighter pilots, the intercept should have been an easy matter.
Compounding the problem was the time it took to relay headings from the Cuban ground controller. Put simply, their target's relatively slow speed of about 160 knots was actually being turned against them -- the MiGs closure rates were too fast and the time to address the rapid changes in the relative positions of the planes was simply too short to relay orders from the ground controller, as the MiGs circled overhead. Had they pulled farther away first, they may have had a chance to get a good heading, acquire their target and fire a missile -- but now they were too close, circling again and again too tightly and going far too fast.
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Slow your speed a little bit so that you are there right with him. No?"
MiG-23 #1 (to Ground Control): "How many objectives do you have, one or two?"
The ground controller apparently checked his notes to reconfirm the color and appearance of the intended target -- had Basulto left his transponder turned on, the Cubans would have been able to know his identity with certainty. With the planes so far north, their concerns were driving them to know for sure that they weren't about to shoot down another American airplane, such as one of the tourist flights that routinely flew down the island chain of the Florida Keys. Critically, what follows on the transcript is absolutely conclusive evidence that the Cuban MiGs were tracking Basulto's plane and none other.
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Only one. Correct. Type of machine, blue? Color?"
MiG-23 #1 (to Ground Control): "Light blue and white."
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Inform."
MiG-23 #1 (to Ground Control): "Aircraft, Cessna 337."
With these terse statements, it is clear that the MiG pilot had spotted Basulto's plane. The Skymaster's light blue paint job with yellow accents on the spinner and wing tips was quite unique in the world. In fact, light blue is an extremely rare color selection for privately-owned, general aviation aircraft, where most planes are painted a stark white and typically carry broad red or blue stripes down the sides of the fuselage. The yellow accents on Basulto's plane easily would have been mistaken for white at the distances from which the MiGs were observing the plane, catching glimpses of it as they flew by at 400 miles per hour.
However, the type of plane, a Cessna 337, with its unique twin-tailed "push-pull" design, could not possibly have been confused with almost any other aircraft design. Except for those flying for the Brothers to the Rescue organization, perhaps only two or three other Cessna 337s were flying in the airspace anywhere in all of Florida. Yet somehow, this identification was still not enough for the Cuban controllers.
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Tell me the registration."
Clearly, so close to the United States, even if the identification of the last plane should have been already obvious, the Cubans knew that there could be no room for error -- they could not bear the political and military fallout from shooting down the wrong plane. The difficulties of managing the intercept without the transponder identifying information were obvious. Basulto had earlier "killed the parrot," turning off his transponder, and the Cubans were increasingly unsure of just what plane they were tracking.
By asking the Cuban MiG pilot to report on the registration numbers from Basulto's aircraft, however, the Cuban controllers effectively doomed the intercept. The registration numbers were painted in yellow and measured only approximately 18 inches high on both sides of the nose of Basulto's plane -- an unusual location as most aircraft sport the numbers on the tail or rear fuselage. In order to comply and get that information, the MiG pilots would have to maneuver to within a few hundred feet of the side of Basulto's plane and make a slow pass. Yet at that point, they were far away from their quarry and quite a bit higher. From their perch above, they could not possibly read the registration numbers -- but the ground controller continued to prosecute the target by relaying new headings and instructions. Even as they were closing in on the Florida Keys, they were going to try to make a fly by and get positive identification.
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "The objective is to the left, distance, four (miles). (Pause) He should be in sight. Altitude in a moment. (Pause) What's the objective's altitude?"
MiG-23 #1 (to Ground Control): "More or less 2,000 (meters) or thereabouts."
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "In front of the objective? You have him 5 degrees to your left and in front."
By this time, Basulto was already well north of the 24 parallel and had even communicated with Miami Center about what had happened to the other two planes. Even then, he was taking no chances that Cubans may still have been hunting him -- a guess that he would later learn probably saved his life. He continued to head north and didn't relax. He was completely unaware of the presence of the Cuban jet fighters close by, circling on the hunt.
Only a few minutes had passed since the MiGs first flew over Basulto's Cessna. It was now 3:52 pm. The Cuban MiGs zoomed back and forth across the sky, having great difficulty reacquiring the target. More confusion ensued as the Cuban ground controller asked the MiGs to follow a heading that somehow he had not provided.
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Follow the headings. Follow."
MiG-23 #1 (to Ground Control): "Headings?"
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Do you have him?"
MiG-23 #1 (to Ground Control): "No, I'm going to turn to pass by there."
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "You see the registration? (Pause) Follow the headings. Very high, there, over there!"
One can almost imagine the agitated ground controller jabbing his finger at the radar screen, saying the words, "over there" no doubt leaving finger prints on his radar screen. The intercept controller seemed to be flailing around in hope that the MiG pilot, by radio from some seventy or eighty miles north, could somehow glean a heading from his excited gestures and hand waving.
Also, in this context, the terms, "Very high," have nothing to do with altitude -- in fact, the aircraft were flying at fairly low altitudes, particularly for jet fighter interceptors. Instead, the term referred most likely to the fact that the intercept had gone so far north, "high" on the map, and was therefore increasingly at risk. The stress level of the Cuban pilots and ground controllers was pressing in upon them and they were becoming more and more agitated and disorganized.
Despite every effort, the flyby to read Basulto's tail numbers had failed and the MiG pilots were getting even more desperate and increasingly anxious. So far north, they wanted to finish the mission and return as quickly as possible.
MiG-23 #1 (to Ground Control): "Correct. (Pause; then shouting....) Give me MORE HEADINGS! A HEADING!"
Despite the demand for more headings, the ground controllers had come to the unavoidable conclusion. In the cramped spaces of ground control radar station, the futility of interception had become obvious. The last plane was destined to escape and the pursuit was already "very high" on the map, too close to the United States to warrant the risk of continuing.
Grimly, the senior officer gave the order to end the hunt. The message was coldly and tersely relayed to the MiG pilot.
Ground Control (to MiG-23): "Suspend the mission."
The clock still read 3:52 p.m. when the mission was called off. The chase had become both wildly undisciplined and extremely risky. Indeed, in another few minutes, even if the Cuban MiGs had finally been able to shoot down Basulto's plane, the pieces would have likely fallen to earth over the Florida Keys, landing in backyards and driveways along U.S. Highway 1.
Incredibly for the Cubans, the greatest risk of all -- that of the sudden arrival of the USAF -- had not materialized. They had been lucky, but the time to press their luck and finish the job had passed.
When the Cubans issued their final recall order, it was fully 17 minutes after the later U.S. military's official report confirmed that the American F-15 Eagle interceptors had been brought back to full battle stations at Homestead AFB, more than enough time to have taken off, headed south, lit up the skies with their onboard radars and summarily downed two Cuban MiGs. The order to launch never came and the F-15s were left idling at the end of the runway, their pilots having missed their chance at making a difference. The only victory celebrations would be in Cuba. The MiG-29UB would later be photographed bearing two red stars painted on the left side of the fuselage, under the cockpit, illustrating success in shooting down the two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft.
The formal ICAO Report, on page 13, in paragraph 1.1.47, confirms these events as follows, "The United States has stated that there were no other small civilian aircraft in the area other than the BTTR aircraft and the Cuban interceptor MiGs. In the transcripts between the MiGs and the Cuban controllers, the MiGs positively identify the third BTTR aircraft, just as it had done with the other two aircraft, prior to shooting them down."
It is interesting to note that the ICAO report specifically notes that the U.S. accuses Cuba of chasing a non-existent light blue and white Cessna 337 and that Cuba agreed that the Cessna it was chasing was not the third BTTR aircraft.
The ICAO report goes on to say, "This bizarre explanation adopted by both the United States and Cuba appears to be convenient position for both parties to take, to cover-up the fact that Cuban MiGs crossed the 24 parallel. This position has been beneficial to the United States in contending that its response was only mildly inadequate. It has also been beneficial to the Cubans in that it makes the murder of the pilots less egregious."
It was exactly this sort of conclusion, now reiterated in the ICAO report, which fueled suspicions of a conspiracy on the part of both governments to finish off the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. Given the ICAO information, one must at least conclude that the U.S. response was grossly inadequate. To quote Major Jeffery Houlihan, the failure of the last pair of MiGs to identify him and pull the trigger made Jose Basulto and the passengers aboard N2506 "extremely lucky."
When asked why Jose Basulto's plane was not shot down, Houlihan answers as a professional should, "I can give you a theory as to why, based on my experience and expertise in the air defense and in radar. I don't believe the Cuban MiGs found him. I think they were so grossly incompetent in the way that they were handling this intercept that they missed him."
The judge then asked Major Houlihan, "Do you know whether or not the Cuban MiGs would have likely been operating on their own internal radar to locate whatever it was they decided to target, or would they have been controlled by radar on the ground from somewhere and being vectored like you do with your intercepts?"
Houlihan explained this facet of air combat as only those involved in defending our nation would know, "I can answer that specifically on what I was trained, according to Soviet tactics, that the Cubans do follow and it's confirmed by what the transcript (of the Cuban pilots) says. Soviet pilots are generally trained to be very carefully controlled from the ground. Ground controlled intercepts are the basis of any Soviet air defense system."
"They would have been controlled from the ground as long as possible, to avoid detection by any U.S. interceptors in the area. I can only speak towards what used to be. I've obviously been out of air defense for over ten years now, so I can't give you specific information. But it's a common tactic to keep your fire control system turned off as long as possible, simply because U.S. interceptors can get an indication of that fire control system."
"And in the old days, when I was in air defense being actively swept by a fire control system under the rules of engagement, meant you could go ahead and shoot that aircraft down. So by keeping their fire control systems off, they avoided any difficulty with any U.S. interceptors that might have been in the area."
"I do know from the transcript [of the Cuban pilots] that once they had difficulty finding the aircraft, and once they were ready, they had visually identified those three aircraft, they then turned on their fire control system so they could use their missiles."
"They saw three aircraft to begin with and then as they began their assault, they did what, in the air defense world as what is known as they lost their situational awareness. They got tunnel vision, locked in on the targets they could see and completely forgot about the other target."
"I think Mr. Basulto was extremely lucky that [the Cuban MiG pilots] were so incredibly bad at their job. Had they been better trained and competent in what they were doing, in a Cessna 337 he would have had no chance for survival."
Sole Survivor
Hope welled inside the families of those killed in the cockpits the Monday following the shootdown when news reports from Cuba stated that they'd found a survivor of the Brothers to the Rescue "plane crash." Their hopes were soon dashed and replaced with confusion, when Cuban-supplied videos played on South Florida television stations showed none of the crew members that had been shot down, but instead displayed images of another member of Brothers to the Rescue -- one who hadn't even flown that day.
The videos were of Juan Pablo Roque, a former Cuban MiG-23 pilot who'd fled from Cuba in 1992. His defection made headlines when he swam to freedom crossing the mine-filled stretch of Guantanamo Bay that separates the U.S. base from the rest of the island. An outspoken critic of Fidel Castro, he was quickly embraced by South Florida's Cuban exile community and joined the Brothers organization as a pilot soon after his defection.
Thus, it came as a shock when the former MiG pilot suddenly appeared on camera sitting next to Fidel Castro, apparently in tip-top condition and hardly looking like someone who'd been shot down in a missile attack.
That very morning, Granma, Cuba's official newspaper, ran an extensive article on Roque detailing his claims that Brothers to the Rescue had been involved in paramilitary training. The article quoted his claims that the Brothers to Rescue organization had been planning to bomb electrical facilities on the island and even had made plans to assassinate Fidel Castro and other senior leaders in Cuba. Roque also claimed to have flown military versions of Cessna 337s (the O-2 Super Skymaster) while with the organization. The article further stated that Roque represented that he had reported these acts to the FBI during the time he was in the U.S., and yet everyone had refused to act upon the information.
While Roque's story about the O-2 Super Skymaster was false, as with every well-conceived disinformation effort, it had a grain of truth to it -- making it a believable tale for those willing to be duped. The true story regarding the tale that the Brothers to the Rescue group had flown O-2s was that several years earlier, a volunteer pilot had approached the organization and had offered the use of his airplane, a civilianized, demilitarized and unarmed O-2 Super Skymaster which he'd acquired as U.S. Government surplus property. At first, the group had allowed him to fly the plane on a few missions. Ultimately, however, they had decided against using the plane because the owner wanted to have the plane in historic "warbird" markings, with USAF insignia. Given the humanitarian, non-military nature of the search and rescue mission, this was simply unacceptable to the Brothers organization.
Like many of the fabrications in Roque's new Havana diatribe, there could be political mileage derived from any point which had its origins in a minor point of fact. As is typical in propaganda campaigns, by burying a small, if seemingly innocuous truth in a bigger lie, some viewers would be convinced of the overall validity of the story.
In this case, it was a simple matter to point to the fact that a volunteer pilot had at least once years earlier flown a couple of missions in a privately owned O-2 -- and then to point out that the same type plane had once flown combat missions with the USAF during the Vietnam War. This minor point was then used to support the larger, false claim that the organization was of late arming itself to attack Cuba and assassinate Fidel Castro.
In the video, Castro railed against the Brothers to the Rescue organization, quoting the reputed survivor's claims and drawing upon them as the justification for the Cuban Government's shootdown of the two planes. Castro stated that the supposedly militaristic Cessnas -- none of which had been O-2s -- had been flying towards Cuba. He further stated that the planes had invaded well into the country's 12-mile limit -- claims that would later be solidly put to rest by the radar print outs and testimony of Major Houlihan.
Whether Castro's video was intended for the Cuban masses, the exile community in South Florida, or both is unclear. However, these obviously baseless claims created a credibility gap north of Havana -- particularly when coupled with Roque's chatter of armed aircraft. There were simply no armed aircraft.
Having flown on many missions themselves, this was one point that virtually every observer in the news media could agree upon. They had numerous videos and interviews that demonstrated exactly the opposite -- for what political aspects there were in the group's humanitarian mission, the point was well-established that they took inspiration not from other Cuban exile guerilla groups like Alpha 66, but from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his philosophy of non-violent protest and action.
As members of the Brothers organization reviewed the Cuban videos, it was immediately clear that the timing of Roque's reappearance in Cuba was highly suspicious. It raised obvious questions to many, including to Jose Basulto, the U.S. Government authorities and the family members of those who were murdered.
Basulto knew, without question, that Roque hadn't been a survivor. He hadn't even flown with the group that day. Thus, seeing his face on the television screen brought up new questions. They openly wondered just who this former MiG pilot was and how he'd gotten back to Cuba. Those closest to Roque and involved with the Brothers had only just begun to unravel his true history and tale but it was evident that a man they once recognized as a Brother had been a Cuban spy all along.
Like many immigrants to the U.S., Roque had job-hopped from one low paying job to the next. Yet unlike most immigrants, his job-hopping appears to have been just a ploy and cover for his real work as a Cuban spy.
Early after his defection from Cuba in 1992, Juan Pablo Roque entered into the fray of Miami's exile politics. After he joined Basulto's Brothers to the Rescue, he formed an organization of his own, composed of ex-Cuban military veterans which he called the Support Center for Cuban Military. The Support Center used short wave radio to beam its messages to the Cuban military, asking them not to take up arms against their countrymen in the event of democratic uprisings. In effect, in what most people at the time had considered a justifiable move, Roque had established a radio station to broadcast to Cuba -- all under his own control and completely in the open.
After joining the Brothers organization, Roque was befriended by Jose Basulto. As a fellow pilot, the friendship was a natural match for Basulto, the aviation legend in the exile community. Through Jose Basulto, he was introduced to the elite in Miami's Cuban exile community.
Additionally, with Jose's help, Juan Pablo Roque had started a business providing physical fitness and personal training services for the well-heeled Hispanics of South Miami. He soon entered a society the likes of which he'd had no chance to even imagine in his native Cuba.
Roque attended church in Miami and it was there that he met and courted his wife to be, Ana, a devout Baptist. While they dated, Roque constantly pushed the issue of marriage and of having a child.
Although reluctant because of the still constant instability in Juan Pablo's personal life, Ana was soon swept off her feet and in love. Roque seemed an ideal husband, being a charismatic former fighter pilot who was both handsome and looked like a trim body builder. He was consistent in his pursuit of her and seemed to offer a promising future for her and her children. She finally said yes and the two married and soon had a baby.
Roque rapidly became something of a star in the defector community. He was even the darling of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), who found his personal story of his escape from Cuba so compelling that in 1995 they published his 140 page, Spanish language autobiography, Desertor (ISBN 1884619061).
CANF helped introduce him to the most senior levels of the exile community. The suave and debonair Juan Pablo Roque even managed to walk the halls of Congress, ingratiating himself with several Cuban-American lawmakers, and getting a photo opportunity with representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Miami) and Robert Menendez (R-New Jersey), which he used in promoting his book.
Roque's book chronicled his defection from Cuba and in it he wrote that his Cuban military comrades were "fat communists & heavy beer drinkers." In retrospect, his comments were apparently nothing more than planned statements to further advance his popularity in Miami and to also simultaneously downplay the threat from Cuba.
While his actions seemed innocuous and clearly demonstrative of his support for anti-Castro cause, there were clues that pointed to other activities, like a confession to his new wife Ana that he had been helping the FBI with "some investigations," and that if he ever had to go somewhere suddenly, she was not to question him.
In the days before the shootdown, Roque did not seem himself. His behavior was very agitated and he was unusually abrupt with his family. About a week before the shootdown, Roque told his wife Ana he was taking a three-day job transporting a boat to Key West, a trip that would pay $2,000.
Ana argued against the idea, not appreciative of the brief separation, but Roque insisted, saying the money was needed to pay for some new furniture the couple had just bought. Ana finally gave in, reminding Juan Pablo to take his cell phone and its remote charger so they could keep in touch. He agreed to do so.
In the wee hours of the morning on February 23, just one day before the shootdown was to occur, Juan Pablo Roque woke up, kissed his wife goodbye and left -- never to be seen on U.S. soil again.
Later that morning, when Ana got into her car to go to work she noticed her husband had forgotten to take the cell phone charger. She tried calling him, but got no answer. In fact, all of her calls to him that day went unanswered.
Some suspect Roque fled the United States on board a commercial airline, heading first to the Bahamas. There were unconfirmed reports of his presence there and news that he had supposedly tried to incite a riot among Cuban rafters being incarcerated there before flying onward to Havana. Others think he may have flown first to Mexico where he met another contact before making his way to Cuba. While the exact route he took to return is still unclear, the day before the shootdown, Roque was filmed stepping out of a commercial airliner in Havana -- the Cubans were already preparing their documentary evidence for possible later use after the shootdown that was to take place the next day.
What was certain was that Juan Pablo Roque was not aboard either of the two aircraft shot down, nor was he a survivor of any plane crash as claimed in the original story in Granma, Cuba's newspaper, on February 25, 1996.
It was two days later before Ana heard any news about her husband. Like others, she was stunned to see his face on Cuban television the day after the shootdown and hear of the story that had run in Granma. For Ana and for many others, the time for questions had already begun:
Was Juan Pablo Roque a spy?
Had he been all along?
How many others were involved?
What else was he doing with that short wave radio?
Murder By Numbers
"Atención! Atención!" With these words, audible over the raucous din of static and noise on the shortwave radio frequencies, a commanding male voice from the Cuban military intelligence service begins a stream of nearly daily messages.
"22333 44444 77645 77647 90909 13425 76490 78399 78654 98534...." The voice announces loud and clear beginning the day's nefarious notation of numbers in five letter groups as hidden radio operators across South Florida put pen to paper.
What sounds like random numbers are a code that drone on in seemingly endless strings and are broadcast over various shortwave radio frequencies throughout the day. Each of the messages are cadenced in a monotone, sometimes lasting an hour or more and heard by those who know to listen over South Florida's airwaves -- that is if you have a shortwave radio receiver.
While it's not clear how often or how many spies tune in, one thing is perfectly clear -- the numbers are copied and the messages do get through, with various spies knowing the times they are to turn on their receivers and begin copying down their specific communications. Other number sequences are probably broadcast that are meaningless, just to ensure that the U.S. Government's counterintelligence arm doesn't have a clear idea of the numbers of spies, or numbers of messages being transmitted.
Among the agents who relied on the numbers was the organization known as "La Red Avispa," or the Wasp Network, a group of spies working for Cuban Intelligence that indiscriminately kept tabs on Cuban exiles in the Miami area. Their operations were only interrupted by their arrests.
Some of the deeds of La Red Avispa were intended to achieve nothing more than creating tension between the media and certain civic leaders in the Cuban-American community, but their other actions were of greater, vicious intent.
Cuba's spy network extends throughout South Florida's Cuban community, gathering information and reporting to handlers in Havana on the activities of local anti-Castro groups like Alpha 66, CAMACOL and Democracia. So extensive is the reporting that some say that Cuba's Intelligence Directorate -- not Israel's Mossad nor the one-time USSR's famed KGB -- is the most effective spy organization in the world.
La Red Avispa's efforts mainly focused on breaching U.S. military security. With every passing month, the group was growing more effective and experienced. Posing as hired workers, they were able to penetrate U.S. Military bases and facilities to observe the tactical goings on across South Florida. In one instance, they even had an agent reporting on the type of aircraft and numbers of jet takeoffs and landings at Boca Chica Naval Air Station.
Two of La Red Avispa, René González (Code name: "Castor") and Juan Pablo Roque (Code name: "German"), were successful in infiltrating the Brothers organization. A photo taken in front of Basulto's beloved search plane, the sky blue and yellow accented Cessna 337 with its tail number N2506 painted on the nose, captured the three "brothers" in a warm moment. González and Roque had fooled everyone, including Basulto himself.
Once Roque and González had joined the group of rescue pilots, they gained access to closely guarded personal information about the group's pilots and flight crews, flight schedules and the radio encryption tables. These encryption tables were used by the group to communicate with the U.S. Coast Guard when calling in the positions of Cuban rafters. This was essential information, as the Cubans would often race the USCG to "rescue" the rafters and bring them back to Cuba, where many would often reportedly "disappear." Roque and González passed all this information on to the Wasp Network leader Gerardo Hernández, who transmitted it to Havana in early 1996.
With this information, Cuban intelligence and Fidel Castro had the information they needed to plan and execute the shootdown. Once the operation to shoot down the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft was set to commence, an order was sent to Hernández warning him not to allow agents German or Castor to fly with Brothers to the Rescue or any other flight rescue group on February 24, 25, 26, or 27. This latter part of the order related to the other rescue groups that often flew the same or a similar rescue mission: the Cuban American Pilots Association, Freedom Flight International, the Rafters Rescue Legion and the Pilotos Democracia.
As ordered, the spies stood down on the days when the shootdown was to occur.
Similarly, a week after the shootdown, Cuban intelligence sent its Miami agents a congratulatory message via the numbers network. "We have dealt the Miami Right a hard blow, in which your role has been decisive." They dubbed the shootdown and assassination of the Brothers pilots, "Operation Scorpion."
Years later, upon the indictment by the U.S. Government of some of the Wasp Network's spies, the mastermind behind Cuba's ambush against the Brothers to the Rescue flight was revealed to the public for the first time that -- it was none other than the head of Havana's Directorate of Intelligence, known only as "MX." While documents do not identify the mysterious "MX," the DI post is usually held by a deputy minister in the Ministry of the Interior, which handles Cuba's internal security.
The Miami indictments detailed La Red Avispa's organization from top to bottom. Many of the spies used aliases of U.S. citizens who had died during childhood. Typically, they lived meagerly, well blended within the community. Still others were the very people that one would never suspect of being a spy -- eking out an existence so poor that it became the perfect cover. La Red Avispa's ring of spies and its mission had its origin within Cuba and the members dispatched to the United States were carefully placed and well-trained.
In the United States, La Red Avispa's ringleader was Gerardo Hernández (Code name: "Giro"), a Captain in the Cuban military who was also known as Manuel Viramontez, a name he'd stolen from a child who died in Texas three decades earlier.
Under the alias Viramontez, Hernández also maintained a set of altered identification papers and a passport. He lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment and drove a 1988 Pontiac Grand Am on the streets of Northeast Miami-Dade County. Captain Hernández's original orders when he arrived in the United States in 1992 were to infiltrate USSOUTHCOM (the U.S. Military's Southern Command), which was being relocated from Panama to Florida.
René González, also known as René González-Sehweret and alternatively as Iselin Castor, fled Cuba aboard a stolen Cuban An-2 crop duster in 1992 and settled in Southwest Miami Dade County. In addition to breaching Brothers to the Rescue, he managed to ascend the ranks of Ramon Saul Sanchez's Democracia Movement to become undersecretary in charge of the both organization's aviation group and its flotillas and logistics.
In 1996, González and Hernández (Viramontez) also "devised and implemented a cover plan to enlist the assistance of unwitting Cuban-American U.S. Congresspersons in obtaining the supposed humanitarian release of Gonzalez's wife to the United States." René González was a double agent who also posed as an informant to the FBI as a means for him obtaining information for Cuba in regard to the activities of the FBI.
Juan Pablo Roque, whose background is covered in the previous chapter, was paid thousands of dollars by the FBI to report back information on Cuban exiles. Incredibly, he served as the FBI's primary source of information about Brothers to the Rescue and its operations. Thus, Roque was perfectly positioned to supply a whole range of false reports to the FBI, designed to slowly and inexorably undercut the status of the group as a non-violent humanitarian organization and bring the U.S. Government to a false conclusion that the group was out to create trouble, was increasingly involved in political anti-Castro activities and was bent on engaging in illegal acts, including planning attacks on Cuba.
The depth and impact of his false reporting continues to pollute the intelligence community's and the public's views about Brothers to the Rescue even to this day, leading many to the ill-founded, entirely wrong conclusion that the group was involved in numerous anti-Castro activities. Some even were misled to conclude that the Brothers to the Rescue flights deserved to be shot down.
Scott W. Carmichael, one of the very officials charged with building the case against another Cuban agent who was involved in the shootdown, Ana Belén Montes, erroneously repeated some of Cuba's carefully placed falsehoods in his book, True Believer. For instance, Carmichael erroneously wrote that on the day of the shootdown, the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft had violated Cuban airspace by "flying over Havana without permission."
Such false reports about the group continue to undermine what would otherwise be seen as a record of nearly unrivalled humanitarian action, resulting in nearly 17,000 lives saved over the course of six years, with thousands of missions flown -- of which perhaps only three had violated Cuban airspace for political purposes. Oddly enough, those flights arguably were aimed more at affecting U.S. policy than toward bringing about a change in Cuba.
Cuban intelligence also utilized Roque to manipulate the FBI in order to gain insight into the conclusions by the FBI's other investigations into Cuban exile groups. In effect, the FBI, the DIA and virtually the entire U.S. intelligence network was being insidiously polluted and manipulated by Cuba's own intelligence service and propaganda machine through a carefully planned "influence campaign" -- not one aimed at the general public, but instead aimed at the U.S. intelligence community. The influence campaign used carefully placed spies either buried within or hired by the very organizations targeted for the campaign. Most importantly, through this network of associates and spies, Castro's claims of wrongdoing on the part of many exile groups were being confirmed steadily and repeatedly by "independent sources" -- of which the members of La Red Avispa were just a part of what the U.S. Government would later classify as a "conspiracy."
Another member of La Red Avispa was Antonio Guerrero, who maintained the aliases of Rolando Gonzalez-Diaz and Lorient. He lived on Big Pine Key and worked as a civilian employee at the Boca Chica Naval Air Station in Key West. He utilized numeric beeper codes to describe the types of aircraft being deployed on any given day.
Guerrero also reported on the use of electronic warfare aircraft, such as the Aerostat blimps that carried radar systems aloft and were also used to broadcast Radio and T.V. Marti from their base on Cudjoe Key, halfway between his home and Boca Chica.
Several other operatives like Joseph Santos-Cecilia, Amarylis Silvero-Garcia and Ruben Campa were involved in attempts to penetrate other military installations including MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa and the U.S. Southern Command in Miami-Dade.
Boat pilot Alejandro Alonzo infiltrated the Democracia Movement and captained their boats during flotilla demonstrations held just outside Cuban territorial waters. His other tasks included monitoring the paramilitary PUND exile group and another of the flight rescue organizations, the small, but highly effective Cuban American Pilots Organization, whose chief pilot, "Sonny" Dorrbecker, would fly alone on many weekends in his single engine, Cessna 210 floatplane, spotting many dozens of rafters over the years. In the latter role, Alonzo completely failed at his mission.
Other low level subordinates in the group worked diligently in the streets of Miami gathering information from within the Cuban community and turning it over to their handlers.
The effectiveness of La Red Avispa and of other Cuban spy networks was widely recognized. Juan Amando Montez, a retired United States Army Special Forces colonel, called Cuba's spy service, "one of the most sophisticated, agile and effective" in the world. Similarly, Hector M. Pesquera, of the FBI's Miami Office, said of the Cuban operatives, "They are one of the world's most aggressive intelligence services there is. They are very determined and they work the numbers. They know we can't cover everything." Yet despite this understanding, the FBI and the DIA fell "hook, line and sinker" for the disinformation it was being fed about the Brothers to the Rescue group.
While Federal agents spent four years playing a Soviet-era style "cat and mouse" game which involved hiding listening devices and searching the homes of members of La Red Avispa, the Cuban agents were trained well enough to recognize that they were being watched, even if they had no clue as to what extent. The Cuban agents resorted to some very old school, yet effective, spy tactics -- they used code names, hidden compartments inside books and stereo speakers, as well as lamps with false bottoms, and as a result were able to remain active in pursuing their goals even while the FBI was trying to sort out the data and track them down.
In the days immediately following the shootdown, there was considerable finger pointing, hand-wringing and rhetoric from the governments on both sides of the Florida Straits. Fidel Castro himself called the incident a plane crash, then an incursion into Cuban airspace. Later, he had to relent after agents from the United States went to Havana with the undeniable evidence of just what had taken place, backed up by copies of the radar screen printouts.
Even as the U.S. Government was struggling to get to the bottom of just what had happened, the members of the Brothers to the Rescue group as well were wrestling with the facts. In many ways, they were the best placed to really understand what had transpired -- knowing the mission, flight routes and operational details at a level that could only come from actually flying the operation. Yet the U.S. Government made little attempt to ask the group for its advice and comment.
Jose Basulto and the families of those killed had many questions -- but they were kept in the dark about what the U.S. Government was doing. This was probably as a result of the false reporting that the Cubans themselves had placed about the group and its plans. Quite simply, the U.S. Government, which prior to 1995, had a strong, daily working relationship with the Brothers to the Rescue leadership and pilots, had been led to reevaluate its relationship with the group based on numerous reports (though later revealed to be false) of alleged misdeeds and supposed plans and training to undertake violent acts against Cuba.
Among their most important questions were some that to this day continue to confound many who study what happened in the skies over the Straits of Florida. Why was there no warning of the MiGs in the skies that day? Why had they not been told that Homestead AFB, the FAA, the DEA and the USAF were aware that Cuban MiGs had entered the search area earlier in the day? Everyone went on the assumption that had anyone known in advance, surely some phone call would have been made or comment passed on -- yet why had no one bothered to call the Brothers to the Rescue operations hangar or let them know when they were filing their flight plans?
One of the immediate questions in the hours after the shootdown was just who was Juan Pablo Roque?
Over the days, months and years following the shootdown, tidbits of information have emerged through the media. Several legal trials and a number of lawsuits were heard and evidence brought forth in the form new documentation or as court testimony. Much of that information is now available as part of the public record, though care must be taken in reviewing what has been published given the extensive and surprisingly ongoing disinformation campaign on the topic still practiced by the Cuban Government, which remains committed to the release of the so-called "Cuban Five" -- former members of La Red Avispa who were convicted of crimes and imprisoned.
Of late, a new round of disinformation and propaganda has issued from Havana, as the Cuban government makes new entreaties to the new, incoming White House team of President Barack Obama. Their new goal is to negotiate a trade based on the release of Cuban political prisoners -- citizens of the island nation who were arrested on dubious, often trumped up grounds within Cuba itself -- for the release of the Cuban Five from the United States, to return them as "heroes" to Havana.
Two of the documents concerning La Red Avispa that came to surface during those legal trials were sourced from FBI agents who worked on the case. The first document, written by U.S. Prosecutor Caroline Heck Miller, defended two FBI searches in a memorandum explaining that, "Since 1995 court-ordered surreptitious entries of residences, and electronic surveillance, had shown the existence and operation of a group of clandestine agents of the Cuban government in South Florida."
FBI agent Raul Hernandez was also quoted from an evidentiary affidavit that indicated the bureau had investigated "the movements, communications and residences" of some of the accused as far back as 1995 -- these memos refer to an active investigation a year prior to the attack on Brothers to the Rescue.
All of the information that was slowly coming to light brought another question to mind -- when did U.S. Federal authorities find out about the plan to attack on Brothers to the Rescue? Was it only as it happened or perhaps days or even months earlier?
Further, since the date of the shootdown, there has been a continuous and consistent weeding out of other spies in the South Florida Cuban community.
Two Florida International University academics, Carlos and Elsa Alvarez, the parents of five children (the youngest being only thirteen), were sentenced to the maximum allowable jail time by a very unsympathetic judge on February 27, 2007, for their dedication and service to the Cuban Intelligence Service. Eleven years and three days after the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown, still others who were involved continue to be apprehended. One can also be sure that as these spies are caught and imprisoned, still others are arriving and starting new missions across South Florida.
The FIU academics, Carlos and Elsa Alvarez, were tearful as they apologized to our nation and to Miami's exile community for their years of deceit and betrayal. Nonetheless, hoping for leniency from the judge, they readily admitted their actions in a plea to allow them to gain lesser charges than those for which they were originally arrested, the charge of being unregistered Cuban agents.
Prosecutors said the discovery of the husband and wife team rattled the Miami exile community to the core because of who the couple had targeted. They'd stooped so low as to target their friend and former boss, the President of FIU. Even more incredulous, they too were reporting on Brothers to the Rescue leader Jose Basulto, saying that he maintained ties to the CIA.
They also spied on the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs in the Clinton Administration, Lula Rodriguez, and also on a personal contact who had met with Richard Nuccio, a former personal advisor on Cuba to President Bill Clinton, who "was very depressed" by Cuba's shootdown of the two Brothers to the Rescue planes.
Amazingly, Carlos Alvarez, who began his gathering of intelligence for the directorate of the Cuban Intelligence Service in 1977, nonetheless called his efforts "innocuous" and "harmless gossip."
Elsa became aware of her husband's double life in 1982, yet she chose to conceal his work and began making contacts with Cuban agents herself. If anything, she set the standard (at least from the perspective of Cuba) for being a supportive wife. She claimed that her husband was trying to unify Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits, believing that he acted in good faith at all times.
When the "Gusanos Alvarez," as some called them, were arrested, agents found shortwave radios and computers with encrypted information in their residence. These had been used to communicate with their Cuban handlers. The information that they revealed showed how they had traveled to Cuba and other countries to meet with the Cuban intelligence service.
This conviction in a Florida Federal Court, coming a decade after the shootdown, reinforces the widely held belief that there are still Cuban spies active in South Florida. That simple conclusion is bolstered by lines of numbers that still play across the airwaves from Cuba.
The messages are broadcast even to this day. They are meant for someone to hear, but whom?
Cuba's Queen of Spies
In the immediate hours after the shootdown, the Pentagon went into high gear to help prepare military response options for the President to consider in the aftermath of the shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft.
As is often the case during a crisis, top officials from across the Defense Department were called together to coordinate U.S. policy, consider military resources and draft potential responses and options for the President of the United States -- then Bill Clinton. Among those called was Ana Belén Montes, the DIA's top Cuba analyst and the most senior Cuba authority within the U.S. Government.
Montes, the daughter of a military psychiatrist, was born in Germany at the U.S. Army's base at Nuremberg. Both her parents were Puerto Rican and proud of being citizens of the United States. She had one brother and one sister, both living in South Florida and both employed as Federal investigators. For the Montes family, public service was a tradition.
Her sister was a U.S. Government Spanish language translator -- in fact, she was directly involved in unraveling the spy network, La Red Avispa. In turn, Ana had gone into the DIA, starting with the agency in 1985 and rose rapidly through the ranks. By 1992, the very year that Brothers to the Rescue really got organized and expanded its missions, she had risen to become the top U.S. analyst on Cuba and its military.
Yet Montes was also Cuba's most senior spy.
As the late afternoon hours passed on the day of the shootdown, the hastily called Pentagon team was reviewing potential military options. Ana Montes was on hand to serve as the key figure to identify Cuban military capabilities, such as the strength of their air force, training levels of their pilots, and numbers of active Cuban bases that could be targeted. The options were hotly debated for many hours.
When in such meetings, it is an accepted tradition that no outside personal calls are taken. Those assigned to the task are there to the end -- essentially cut off from their families and friends until the job is done. Only after all of the options have been hashed through and a final set of plans are prepared can they relax, and only then for just a little bit. If the call comes, the same team will also form the central crux in the briefings about and, ultimately, in the execution of the military response that they had authored.
Ana Montes was a key member of two teams that day -- seeming to work for the Pentagon while undertaking her duties on behalf of Cuban intelligence. She was their "Queen of Spies," in deep at the DIA. Her participation in the military planning group was essential, but more important was her reporting back to Cuba on the potential actions that might result from the meetings she was attending. If a military option was taken, Montes would be perfectly placed to ensure that the Cubans were ready, perhaps even positioned to spring their own ambush against attacking American aircraft -- the fact that American airmen could die as a result apparently didn't bother her in the slightest.
Yet as long as she was confined within the tightest, most secure rooms of the Pentagon, she was completely incapable of communicating with the Cubans in any meaningful way. The Cubans also knew this. As the hours ticked by, Havana was growing increasingly concerned -- if there was to be a military response, it was also possible that she would not be able to leave the Pentagon until after it was over. Both she and her handlers knew that she had to get out and make a report.
Thus, the Cubans had to take a risk, given the importance of the information they felt she may have had -- and so they simply called her on her cell phone.
Inside the Pentagon, where classified meetings are often held, cell phones are usually left behind and switched off. Many offices have small baskets at the front desk where those coming in for meetings drop off their phones. Yet Montes had kept hers with her and left it switched on. When the phone rang, she took the call, telling others present that it was a personal call.
Reg Brown, another DIA analyst who was also coincidently schooled in the field of counterintelligence, was also in the meeting. A consummate professional, he was shocked to see Montes answer her phone. In fact, he found it strange enough that she even had her phone with her. His own personal security antenna went up -- at least a little -- as Montes left the room. When she returned, she loudly declared that she had to leave the meeting at 8:00 p.m. With that, Reg's antenna went through the stratosphere -- in the midst of a crisis, he knew full well, you simply didn't take personal calls and you certainly didn't leave and go home early.
Others around the room made little note of her statement, perhaps thinking that the other DIA analyst would cover for her once she left, but Reg knew better. He watched her closely as the team went through its machinations -- and then listened quietly as she again stated that she would have to leave at 8:00 p.m.
When the clock struck 8:00 p.m., Montes simply left, leaving a stunned Reg behind to begin to assemble the pieces of a puzzle that would ultimately unravel the identity of Cuba's master spy.
Some days later, Reg's suspicions were further bolstered by one stunning fact -- that in the wake of the shootdown, the Cuban Government, despite having outright committed murder, seemingly had engineered a very effective public relations campaign in its favor. Somehow, Cuba was now portraying itself as the victim -- and the story was working.
In and of itself, that wouldn't have highlighted any other information about Montes, but that simple fact served as the next pointer for Reg Brown. Separately, he learned that Admiral Eugene Carroll had previously been on a trip to Cuba. It was during that trip that the Cubans had told him that they were contemplating shooting down the Brothers to the Rescue flights if the U.S. Government didn't stop the group from flying into its airspace. The day after the shootdown, Brown had watched as the admiral was interviewed on the news telling the American public how, just the day before the shootdown, he had met with a whole host of senior U.S. Government officials to convey Cuba's message -- and yet nothing had been done.
Reg Brown was confident in his knowledge that the timing of Admiral Carroll's meetings was just too coincidental to have been a matter of chance. A 24 hour "advance warning" was just too fast to expect any real, coordinated U.S. Government response, yet it was still warning enough for the American public to believe that the U.S. had been reasonably forewarned about Havana's interest in stopping the Brothers to the Rescue organization from over flying Cuba. This had the net effect of tilting public opinion toward Cuba's position.
With a little bit of further investigation, Brown uncovered one simply stunning fact: that Ana Montes had been responsible for scheduling Admiral Carroll's meetings, seemingly by coincidence on the day before the shootdown. To Brown's trained mind, such coincidental timing had all the hallmarks of a Cuban so-called "influence campaign," designed to affect the general public's views and thereby influence policy makers or create an impression of events that would favor Cuba.
For a trained counterintelligence professional like Reg Brown, identifying such little, unexplained coincidences were the daily routine of his job, and he was highly skilled at the task. These tiny coincidences served as critically conclusive evidence that something was amiss and he knew it, deep in his gut, that Ana Belén Montes was a Cuban spy.
Still, even Reg had to admit that his suspicion was based on little more than a gut feeling, a few bits of evidence and a coincidence. He knew that wouldn't be enough to truly catch a spy. Further, Ana Montes was known for being quite unforgiving and harsh -- word amongst many in the DIA was that you didn't come out on the winning end if you crossed her in a meeting. Additionally, she had a lot of friends inside the DIA and it was widely recognized that she worked hard with great dedication. She was one of the rising stars of the agency, which was the U.S. Military's top defense intelligence entity. Reg knew that he would have to give the matter very careful consideration before taking his suspicions to one of his colleagues, a friend and counterintelligence officer named Scott W. Carmichael. If he was wrong about Montes, the ramifications could be quite damaging to his career.
Finally, with his conscience urging him on, he took the step and made an informal report to Carmichael, who, after swearing to Reg that he would act discreetly on the matter, agreed to check out the key concerns. Carmichael went about the seemingly routine matter of finding out about Ana's strange personal call at the Pentagon, checking on a note he had uncovered in her official file which indicated that in earlier years, she had once expressed strong disagreement with U.S. policy on Cuba, and uncovering her role in arranging Admiral Carroll's briefings the day before the shootdown. To do that, he decided to bring Montes in for a "routine" security interview, as if updating her security clearance. However, what followed was anything but routine.
At first Montes was evasive, which only served to raise Carmichael's suspicions. Then, Montes' reactions to Carmichael's persistent questions turned sophisticated and became carefully worded. She answered most of his suspicions -- almost. When it came to the matter of the personal phone call, she simply lied. Knowing that the DIA would double check her story with anyone she might have claimed was on the other end of the line, she was left with few options -- so she stated flatly that there had been no personal call that night at the Pentagon. That claim was enough to trigger Carmichael's instincts and kick off his first investigation.
Yet despite these first efforts, and despite a concerted investigative effort, Carmichael couldn't get any further on the matter. So, with just a gut feeling and a little instinct, as well as what appeared to him to be an unjustifiable lie to go on, in November 1996, Carmichael was finally forced to shelve the investigation and move on to other cases. His suspicion about Montes remained, but was soon forgotten amidst the other investigations and programs of the counterintelligence office.
The matter of Ana Montes remained a minor footnote in Carmichael's memory for several years. Then, one day informal word reached Carmichael at his office at the DIA of an ongoing FBI investigation in search of a Cuban spy that the FBI believed was hiding somewhere high up within the U.S. Government. A new, if relatively minor piece of information had emerged in the FBI's ongoing investigation. The FBI was trying to run their new data through the system and network of counterintelligence officers to see what might turn up.
Based on what little information he had, Carmichael ran a search through the DIA's own personnel computers to see what matches he might get on the profile of the "person of interest." Popping up on his computer screen halfway down the list was a name he had long since nearly forgotten, that of Ana Belén Montes. Stunned, he immediately turned to his co-worker and launched into a complete recounting of his earlier experience. Even with so little to go on, both were convinced that they had found the spy.
They made a report to the FBI and were immediately called in for a briefing. Then, because there was so little solid evidence to go on, they were simply dismissed. As the professionals at the FBI so aptly noted, they really had nothing to prove the case. Even if a "gut feeling" and a few coincidences seemed to point a finger, that sort of thing was commonplace, typically leading to nothing more than a pointless exercise that wasted time and investigative resources. Until they had more, nothing would be done -- they would have to focus on other more promising leads and directions of investigation in their ongoing effort to uncover Cuba's spy.
Despite being dismissed on the matter, Carmichael elected to stay focused on Montes, sending additional bits and pieces of information about her to the FBI over the months that followed. He hoped that something of value would turn up or that perhaps another coincidence might trigger a more extensive investigation and evaluation.
In the end, it was his perseverance that won out. The FBI finally launched a full field investigation. What it revealed stunned everyone in the agency -- Montes was the perfect spy, totally hidden and totally unexpected.
By the DIA's own admission, Montes was the ideal analyst. Her personnel file was chock full of impressive reports and awards for her work over the years. Further, she was anything but the typical profile of a spy. She was frugal, had few friends, kept quiet about her affairs, and, most importantly, worked with a singular focus at the DIA that was extraordinary.
As Carmichael would later relate in his book, True Believer (ISBN 1591141001), she would come into the office with punctuality, turn on her computer and go to work. Without as a much as a coffee break, she was at the task until lunch, which she ate at her desk. Then, without fail, she worked through the afternoon until the end of a normal work day, went home and lived a quiet, private home life. This routine was broken only by the various meetings and briefings that an analyst at her level would typically be called to attend. She would attend to these with extraordinary precision, always fully prepared and always making statements summarily backed by factual data and other corroborating reports filed by various agents in the field.
On a personal level, her few friends and colleagues said that they knew Montes to be a caring aunt to her nieces and knew her to be also devoted to her family. Her parents were long since divorced and her father had recently died. Montes was close with her siblings and mother, which was further demonstrated by the help she offered in researching her mother's Spanish language memoir about what it was like growing up in Puerto Rico. She was unmarried, but had lately started a new relationship with another DIA analyst. She made it clear that her work at the DIA was more important to her than her personal life and relationships.
Her educational background was also extraordinary. She held a degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia and Master's Degree from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. She was fluent in Spanish and had dedicated her life to U.S. defense matters and policy.
Her career at the DIA had been successful, having been first assigned to follow the events in Nicaragua, which involved the contras and the Sandinista Government and then, later in 1992 with those programs wrapping up, she was reassigned to become a full-time analyst on Cuba.
Montes was also a no-nonsense professional, too wrapped up in her work to be involved in after work chatter or other social activities. "She was reticent, not outgoing or garrulous," said Gillian Gunn Clissold, the director of the Georgetown University Caribbean Project. For several years, Georgetown ran a study group on Cuban issues which Montes attended and which Gunn had chaired. "She was scrupulously polite, but very quiet and reserved. Very bright, but quiet and reserved," he noted.
Others went so far as to describe her as "brusque" and "harsh." Yet that was also what made her the favored analyst in her division in the DIA. Despite this hard front in the office, many noted that she was happy with her work, satisfied and positive about her future.
Based on her drive, dedication and incredible focus, she was quickly promoted to the position of senior analyst and ultimately became the senior briefer on Cuba for the entire U.S. defense establishment. The leadership at DIA had wanted to promote her again to the position of section chief, but she declined, stating that she found herself most effective in the position she held, focusing not on regional affairs, but exclusively on Cuba.
In retrospect, her decision to remain the senior Cuba officer was probably at least in part if not entirely directed by Cuban intelligence, which no doubt found her posting in her existing position to be of great value. From her DIA cubicle, she was equally useful in garnering information about U.S. spying against Cuba, passing on secrets to Cuba and undertaking long term influence campaigns to corrupt the U.S. Government's own thinking about Cuba.
From her position as senior briefer on Cuba and even prior to that, when working Contra issues on El Salvador and Nicaragua, Montes had proved to be an extraordinary asset for Cuba. Numerous U.S. agents in Cuba were summarily "discovered" by the Cubans and many were quietly "turned" into double agents by use of threat. Technical efforts were repeatedly thwarted even as they were launched. Other program failures were architected over the years concerning Central America.
As a result, the stream of reporting coming out of Cuba and about Cuba had been slowly and effectively taken over by the Cubans themselves. At one point, a key U.S. Army Special Forces NCO, Staff Sgt. Gregory A. Fornius, involved in training operations in El Salvador, was identified to the Cubans by Montes. As a result, he was subsequently killed by Cuban-backed guerillas.
For the Cubans, with Montes in place, disinformation, misinformation and influence campaigns were made easy -- and corroboration was supplied through one of the many double agents that had fallen into Cuban control, as well as through La Red Avispa. When Montes briefed a topic, her points were backed up by factual data and reports from Cuba's own network of double agents, who served as seemingly trusted and validated sources for the U.S. Government -- validated, in part, by Montes' own conclusive reporting and analysis. Behind the whole picture, pulling the strings of power by manipulating the information stream, was Ana Belén Montes and, above her, the Cuban Directorate of Intelligence.
By summer of 2001, the FBI's investigation had reached its climax. A secret raid of her apartment found a shortwave radio, bundles of foreign currency, no less than five passports, plus tape recording equipment as well as two computers which contained a number of incriminating documents. The later Federal indictment would also make note that the investigators had found a set of numeric coding strings printed "on water soluble paper to permit its rapid destruction in an emergency."
FBI agents followed Montes through the parts of the day when she wasn't at work at the DIA. At first, they saw nothing of significance, but after many weeks, they observed her making a series of short phone calls using pre-paid calling cards from public pay phones near the National Zoo, despite the fact her apartment was just around the corner on Cleveland Avenue. On other occasions, they watched as she departed her apartment, traveled to Maryland or into downtown Washington, stopping at a gas station to make pay phone calls, again using pre-paid calling cards, and then heading back home. When they tracked down the recipients of those calls, they found that she was dialing beeper numbers and entering a long series of numeric codes, before hanging up. Such behavior was viewed as the hallmark of an active foreign agent.
Still, one thing eluded the FBI. Most spies were caught through uncovering various Secret and Top Secret documents that they had in their possession, hidden away at home or at some other site. After all, the mission of the average spy was to report on classified information to the foreign governments. Yet for the Montes case, the FBI hadn't uncovered a single classified document in her possession. It hadn't yet occurred to them that Montes mission was perhaps more focused not on stealing secrets but on creating and coordinating false information from her position inside the DIA. What classified data she did report to the Cubans was memorized and reported by her with no need for the supporting documents, such was the trust that the Cubans placed in her information. As the evidence mounted, however, the FBI was finally convinced that they had found their top spy.
By the end of the summer, the FBI was poised to move to the next step. Their plan for the next phase of the investigation and prosecution was to follow Montes' actions more closely and, through the information and connections that were revealed, uncover and roll up the entire network of handlers and Cuban agents with whom she was involved.
Then, quite unexpectedly, the terrorists struck on September 11, 2001.
What followed was one of the most confusing times for the U.S. intelligence community. Beyond the finger pointing and mad scramble to get to the facts of how such an event could take place, there was the quietly whispered wonderings of how U.S. intelligence had failed so badly. There was also the national mourning for over 2,000 dead. And most critically, the Bush Administration was ready to strike back.
Even as the plans for the U.S. response to September 11 were in the earliest stages, the FBI's chief investigators and the DIA's senior leadership concluded that Montes had suddenly become an extraordinary risk to U.S. national security. Through the coming months, if left in place, she would be regularly reporting to Cuba and Castro, who in turn, with connections to a host of governments that were enemies of the United States, would be passing on the information to those most interested -- to Iran, to Iraq, to Libya and elsewhere, and thereby, to the Taliban and to Bin-Laden's Al Qaeda. The value of leaving her in place so as to ultimately roll up the rest of the network that was supporting her suddenly had paled in comparison to the threat to national security that she had become.
It seemed that Montes herself was initially somewhat conflicted in her views. Nonetheless, it didn't take long for her to make the choice to continue supporting the Cubans. Her own state of mind in the wake of the September 11 attacks was revealed an e-mail message just three days after the attack. She wrote, "I could see the Pentagon burning from my office. Nonetheless, it pales next to the World Trade Center."
She also intoned, "Dark days ahead. So much hate and self-righteousness on all sides."
Even as the rest of the nation was coming together in its response to the attacks, with the phrase, "on all sides," it was also clear that Montes had quietly turned even more critical of the United States, its people and its future.
Whereas before, Montes' activities had impacted U.S.-Cuban interests, the FBI was forced to conclude that if she had been left in place for even a few more days, her impact would have become truly global -- the rest of DIA, largely unaware of the Montes investigation, was slated to start planning the attack on Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. From her desk, she would have had access to the entire U.S. war plan. Moreover, Cuba was on the State Department's list of nations that sponsored terrorism and therefore, an upcoming topic for DIA would involve discussions of possible military responses aimed against Cuba.
At roughly 10:00 a.m. on September 21, 2001, the FBI moved in and arrested her at the DIA building on Bolling AFB. To avoid a scene in her office, they called her to a meeting at the Office of the Inspector General to discuss an issue with "one of her subordinates." Totally unaware of what was about to happen, she walked right into her own arrest. An attempt to interview her in the immediate aftermath of her arrest, a time when other spies would often reveal critical information about their spying, failed outright. Montes was taken away, having cited her right to representation and then betraying nothing more in her silence. Her shocked co-workers were informed of Montes' arrest and role as a spy in a subsequent meeting.
For Scott Carmichael, a year of hard work on the Montes case had ended. He had kept true to a secret promise made at the time of Montes' 44 birthday party earlier that very same year -- his gift to her would be a lifetime jail sentence. The nation owes a debt to such counterintelligence experts who work quietly in secret -- and specifically to Scott Carmichael -- for the extraordinary dedication and effort put in toward tracking down and prosecuting Montes. He is a true hero.
In the wake of Montes' arrest, once faced with the reality of the trial, she plea bargained and agreed to cooperate with the FBI. Over the course of seven months, she was extensively debriefed by U.S. authorities. Much of what she had to say remains classified, but it is clear that she ranks as one of the highest placed and most damaging foreign agents ever engaged against the United States.
Publicly, the FBI has confirmed that she had been spying for the Cubans for 16 years. It is also clear that she didn't spy for money but instead for purely ideological reasons. She was diametrically opposed to the U.S. policies on Cuba and thought her actions were fully justified in helping Cuba counter-balance the power of the United States.
According to the later grand jury indictment against Montes, Montes' activities had dramatically undercut U.S. intelligence gathering efforts. For instance, she had unmasked the identities of a series of U.S. covert intelligence officers assigned to Cuba -- the first in May 1994, then a second in September 1996, and thereafter two others in May 1997. None of those agents were harmed, but instead were used by the Cubans to track Cuban dissidents with whom meetings were undertaken.
The affidavit accompanying the grand jury indictment reveals that a document was found on Montes' computer praising her for her work in uncovering one of the U.S. agents. The Cuban government "was able to direct its counterintelligence resources against the U.S. officer." Further, in the text of the document, the Cubans informed her, "We told you how tremendously useful the information you gave us from the meetings with him resulted, and how we were waiting here for him with open arms." Amazingly, so proud of her role in the matter for Cuba, she saved the document on her hard drive, where it was later found by the FBI.
Even more astonishing was that Montes had played the key role in drafting a U.S. Government finding that declared Cuba no longer a military threat to the United States. Her manipulation of critical data about the capabilities of Cuba's defense forces and its air force no doubt formed the basis of that conclusion.
Once Montes was convicted as a Cuban spy, there would be no doubt that she would face the death penalty -- and this fact alone probably explains her sudden desire to cooperate and submit to a full debriefing of her activities.
Nothing, however, could be assured. Thus, for her trial, Montes hired Preston Burton and Plato Cacheris, a former U.S. Marine and former Assistant U.S. Prosecutor. Together, the team had become veteran plea bargain brokers who specialized in representing foreign spies. Just a few months earlier, Burton and Cacheris had represented one of Moscow's chief spies, the senior FBI counterintelligence agent, Robert P. Hanssen. For Hanssen, they worked out a deal in exchange for his cooperation and guilty plea. A few years earlier, in 1994, Burton and Cacheris had also represented Moscow's top spy at the CIA, Aldrich H. Ames, on trial for his role in selling secrets to Russia. For Ames, they were able to garner a life sentence instead of the expected death penalty.
Working in Montes' defense, Cacheris made it a point to emphasize that Montes hadn't spied for money. "She was motivated by a desire to help the Cuban people, and she did not -- I underline -- did not receive any financial benefit." To justify her actions, Cacheris went on to explain that she had offered to help Cuban intelligence "because of her belief that United States policy does not afford Cubans respect, tolerance and understanding."
In making such statements through her defense attorneys, Montes was also undertaking one final disinformation campaign on behalf of the Cubans. She was attempting to convince the public at large, even through the context of her own criminal trial, that she was justified in spying for a known enemy of the United States. She claimed to be justifiably driven to it by the United States' policies regarding Cuba, which she considered immoral. In Montes' view, Cuba was a victim of U.S. aggression and deserved her support.
On March 19, 2002, with Cacheris taking the lead, a plea bargain deal was hammered out on Montes' behalf. Still unrepentant and citing her belief that U.S. policy toward Cuba and Fidel Castro was "cruel and unfair," Montes was sentenced to 25 years of jail time without the possibility of parole. After her release, she would also face five additional years of supervised probation. Like the other top spies, she had avoided the death penalty.
Several months later, on October 18, 2002, in an Internet forum interview, belying her one-time role as one of Cuba's topmost agents in the U.S., Cuba's Foreign Minister, Felipe Pérez Roque (no relation to Juan Pablo Roque) took the time to express his "profound respect and admiration" for her and for her work.
He stated that he hoped someday, "it will be unnecessary for men and women of the moral stature of Ana Belén Montes and of the five Cuban heroes [of the Red Avispa] -- also unjustly imprisoned in the United States -- to sacrifice their lives, their families and their personal interests."
"Her [Montes'] actions were moved by ethics and by an admirable sense of justice," Pérez Roque noted, continuing to build on Cuba's longstanding disinformation and influence programs.
In the wake of Montes' conviction, a better picture of her role in handling Castro's "problem" with Brothers to the Rescue has also become clearer.
Her carefully managed actions had magnified the significance of the roles of the ten other Cuban agents, including those of La Red Avispa, who had been arrested three years earlier in 1998, and of the four more members of that same spy ring who were indicted in May of 1999.
From her position at the DIA, Ana Belén Montes had carefully incorporated the reports of the FBI's key agent, Juan Pablo Roque, and the other members of La Red Avispa, into her own reports. She repeatedly presented conclusions at meetings and in official policy documents, all based on "sound" facts that had been corroborated by numerous other sources -- all of which were the agents she knew to be Cuban spies. Her acts of espionage played an insidious role. Knowing the data to have been sourced from double agents, she was able to easily prioritize it in her reporting, allowing her to further increase the importance of those agents while simultaneously weaving together a compelling, convincing story on behalf of her intelligence service handlers in Cuba.
With her data coming in from all sources, she drew her conclusions carefully, prioritizing the views and reporting of Cuban agents over and above any other reports from truly loyal agents, which, one by one, she eliminated over time. In this manner, she slowly shifted the view and understanding of the entire U.S. intelligence community, and as part of that effort, painted a picture that Brothers to the Rescue was involved in planning illicit activities against Cuba. She succeeded in rebranding Brothers to the Rescue as an untrustworthy organization that had to be watched carefully.
These reports and others, as well as her participation at numerous interagency briefings, were spread far and wide within the U.S. intelligence community. She built a lie so effective that some other analysts, when considering the shootdown, were led to conclude that the Brothers organization had gotten what it deserved. If you play with fire, they said, you're likely to get burned.
Montes' strategies followed the lines of classic disinformation campaigns. She built on the few political acts the Brothers to the Rescue had actual undertaken to repaint the picture to Cuba's liking. She effectively placed the group into the same category as other, more violent Cuban Exile organizations in Miami, like Alpha 66, even despite that the Brothers to the Rescue organization was by far the least politically charged and least aggressive entity.
Such was the level at which Montes played that she was able to selectively emphasize and deemphasize the various facts about the Brothers to the Rescue, thereby leading the Pentagon, the White House and the entire intelligence community around by the nose. The few transgressions that the group had undertaken were expanded upon until it seemed that everything the group was doing was political in nature. Furthermore, the reporting through La Red Avispa, which was partly on the payroll of the FBI, was highlighted to falsely show that the Brothers were preparing for armed actions against Cuba, which would have been in direct violation of U.S. law.
Montes' own intense focus on the Brothers to the Rescue was directly the result of Fidel's own personal obsession with the group. Far from being misplaced, Castro recognized that Brothers to the Rescue, alone among the many Cuban Exile organizations, posed a unique threat to his government. Even if that threat was actually relatively minor, it was still real enough to be of concern for Castro, who routinely delved into such details and whose paranoia is nearly legendary.
Over the years, the mountains of disinformation that Ana Montes carefully assembled added up beautifully to create a new reality for policy makers in Washington. Her conclusions and the vast range of data provided by numerous Cuban double agents had formed the key underpinnings of the entire decision making apparatus in the U.S. Government.
The tenets of her long term disinformation campaign were a welcome song to the ears of many in the Clinton Administration and at the State Department. There were many who were predisposed to conclude that the Brothers to the Rescue had become an unmanageable problem for both the U.S. and for Cuba. From there, it wasn't a difficult leap to make a shootdown not only possible and but perhaps even palatable, or so Castro thought.
For example, in the days after the shootdown, Montes had even been called up to Congress to brief the leading proponents of U.S.-Cuban policy there, Reps. Lincoln Díaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Both were Republicans elected in South Florida's most highly charged congressional districts, where Cuban-Americans often lead the vote at the poll. Secure in her own knowledge of personal complicity, Montes never batted an eye, continuing her disinformation campaign by coldly briefing the two most powerful Cuban-American members of Congress in the events of the shootdown. In the end, in part due to Montes' briefings, the Congress advised against a military response to Cuba.
With the latest challenge to Cuba's communist government over, Castro was clear to move on to his next goals, that of directly swaying U.S. policy toward Cuba, ending the embargo and freeing his government from the ever-present threat implied by the presence of the U.S. Military. According to the debriefings and subsequent documents, Montes' actions after the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown were even more important for Cuba. For instance, in 1998, she was the key drafter of a high profile finding that discounted the risks from Cuba's chemical and biological warfare programs. Her finding declared that the military threat from Cuba had all but evaporated, thus opening the door for reconciliation between Washington and Havana.
With Cuba's encouragement, portions of the Montes report were released and run up the flagpole. They made headlines. Simultaneously, numerous pro-Cuba lobbyists and apologists were enrolled, sometimes unknowingly, by Cuban intelligence in a massive influence campaign with the goal of encouraging the U.S. to reestablish relations with Fidel Castro.
Many newspapers around the country cited the Montes report, including the network of papers in the Knight Ridder News Service, which wrote, "The Pentagon has concluded that Cuba poses no significant threat to U.S. national security and senior defense officials increasingly favor engaging their counterparts to reduce existing tensions."
Despite the conclusive nature of the report, then Secretary of Defense William Cohen still harbored doubts about Cuba's intentions. His opposition to the conclusions of the Montes report, however, was quickly labeled as being nothing more than him bowing to the powerful Cuban exile lobby. Yet Cohen trusted his instincts and cancelled the scheduled presentation of the DIA report to the Congress, thereby downplaying its impact.
Still, Cuba's disinformation campaign had gained a lot of ground and many of those in the Defense Department embraced Montes' conclusions. Marine General Charles Wilhelm, head of SOUTHCOM, stated to the Miami Herald that the Cuban military "has no capability whatsoever to project itself beyond the borders of Cuba, so it's really not a threat to anyone around it."
Subsequently, in an op-ed piece that ran in the Palm Beach Post in 1998, retired Marine General Jack Sheehan related that the U.S. needed a softer line toward Cuba. He further stated that he had personal experience in the matter, having only recently come back from a trip where he had talked amicably with Fidel Castro over rum and cigars. In the op-ed piece, General Sheehan smartly repeated Montes' conclusion, "Our intelligence data also supported the conclusion that Cuba was not a military threat to the U.S."
Incredibly, her hit parade of activities on behalf of Cuba continued to spool out even after her report was issued. In 2000, Montes was a player in the interagency briefings that pulled together U.S. policymakers and decided on the final response to the seven-month saga over the custody of the young child, Elián González, who left Cuba on a raft with his mother, but was the only survivor. It would be Ana Montes' last action relating to Cuban rafters. In reviewing that sad tale, one is left to wonder if her subtle talents in developing coalitions and manipulating information were the key to the Clinton Administration's decision to seize the boy and forcibly return him to Cuba.
With her arrest, Montes' role in the affairs of Cuban rafters, of Brothers to the Rescue, and of Cuban policy had ended. DIA agent Scott Carmichael's "birthday present" would prove to be 25 years in jail.
Even at her final hearing before the judge, Montes remained unrepentant and unapologetic for her role as a spy and as an accomplice in murder. Standing to address the judge, she made one final statement:
An Italian proverb perhaps best describes the fundamental truth I believe in: "All the world is one country." In such a "world-country," the principle of loving one's neighbor as much as oneself seems, to me, to be the essential guide to harmonious relations between all of our "nation-neighborhoods." This principle urges tolerance and understanding for the different ways of others. It asks that we treat other nations the way we wish to be treated -- with respect and compassion. It is a principle that, tragically, I believe we have never applied to Cuba.
Your honor, I engaged in the activity that brought me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than the law. I believe our government's policy towards Cuba is cruel and unfair, profoundly unneighborly, and I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it. We have displayed intolerance and contempt towards Cuba for most of the last four decades. We have never respected Cuba's right to make its own journey towards its own ideals of equality and justice. I do not understand why we must continue to dictate how the Cubans should select their leaders, who their leaders cannot be, and what laws are appropriate in their land. Why can't we let Cuba pursue its own internal journey, as the United States has been doing for over two centuries?
My way of responding to our Cuba policy may have been morally wrong. Perhaps Cuba's right to exist free of political and economic coercion did not justify giving the island classified information to help it defend itself. I can only say that I did what I thought right to counter a grave injustice.
My greatest desire is to see amicable relations emerge between the United States and Cuba. I hope my case in some way will encourage our government to abandon its hostility towards Cuba and to work with Havana in a spirit of tolerance, mutual respect, and understanding. Today we see more clearly than ever that intolerance and hatred -- by individuals or governments -- spread only pain and suffering. I hope for a U.S. policy that is based instead on neighborly love, a policy that recognizes that Cuba, like any nation, wants to be treated with dignity and not with contempt. Such a policy would bring our government back in harmony with the compassion and generosity of the American people. It would allow Cubans and Americans to learn from and share with each other. It would enable Cuba to drop its defensive measures and experiment more easily with changes. And it would permit the two neighbors to work together and with other nations to promote tolerance and cooperation in our one "world-country," in our only "world-homeland."
Judge Urbina, who presided over the case, rightfully considered her statement disturbing. In response, he was brief but cutting. He simply stated, "I'm not going to say much... Today is a very sad day. It's a very sad day for you, Miss Montes, for your family, for your loved ones, for every American who loves this country."
He then went on to say, "If you can't love your country, then at the very least you should do it no wrong."
For Roscoe Howard, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, her statement was not unexpected. "She did grave damage to this country," he later commented. "We thought she owed the country an apology. We're disappointed she didn't provide it."
One could also say that she owes an apology to the families of the four Brothers to the Rescue pilots who died, in part, because of her actions -- outright complicity in the murder of American citizens. One can only hope that as the years go by, she will finally cease being proud of her record as Fidel Castro's one-time Queen of Spies.
At this writing, Ana Belén Montes is serving her sentence at the Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell located on the northeast corner of the Naval Air Station, Joint Reserve Base in Fort Worth, Texas. FMC Carswell provides specialized medical and mental health services to female offenders. Why she has been moved to this type of facility is unclear.
Her tentative release date is scheduled for July 1, 2023, at which time she will be 66 years old.
Complicity, Castro andthe Clinton Administration
As the years have passed, a substantial amount of evidence has emerged pointing to the existence of advance knowledge of the shootdown at the highest levels of United States Government.
Strictly speaking, the legal definition of complicity in the murder of the four Brothers to the Rescue pilots does not apply. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that some senior staff in the White House had prior knowledge of the planned attacks on Brothers to the Rescue -- and yet remained silent.
In doing so, even if unwittingly, they effectively condoned the shootdown and murder of U.S. citizens. One can only hope that this can be attributed to the disinformation campaign that the Cubans were able to mount through La Red Avispa, Ana Belén Montes and through others, perhaps even to this day unidentified -- yet even then, the actions of these senior leaders are nearly unfathomable and to many, simply inexcusable.
Such a statement is not intended to be shocking or purposefully sensational -- it is only made here because the facts stand strongly as part of the public record - the fact that some knew of the planned shootdown and chose not to act is virtually undeniable.
Nonetheless, it is also critically important to measure such a statement through the glass of U.S. policy and the challenges that face our nation's policy makers. What is clear is that the Clinton Administration failed miserably in its policies toward Cuba. Ultimately, four Americans were murdered.
What is also clear is that the Cuban Directorate of Intelligence is continuously and heavily engaged in an ongoing disinformation campaign regarding the shootdown. They have skewed information and manipulated the conclusions about what happened that day and what has transpired since, attempting to both turn public opinion and official opinion within the U.S. Government to favor Cuba. Thus, when reviewing the case that can (and should) be made about the role of senior U.S. Government officials, one must be careful to separate the truth from the falsehoods that the Cubans have planted -- and one must make a reasoned assessment of just what the responsibility of our leadership truly was and how they failed, even in the final hours, to act to prevent a cold-blooded murder just off the U.S. coast.
There is no direct evidence that President Bill Clinton himself had prior knowledge of the plan. However, it is conclusive that advisors at the highest levels of his Administration knew of Cuba's plans to shoot down the planes before it happened, as did members of the U.S. Military and of the State Department's diplomatic corps -- and many of these senior advisors knew for months or at least weeks what was coming, but failed to act.
It is also questionable as to whether President Clinton was kept as fully in the dark as one might initially be led to conclude.
Put simply, too many people knew too much. Further, the upcoming events were nearly the talk of the town in the hours leading up to the shootdown. There have been some who have wondered aloud just how the President could not have known.
In order to fully appreciate the details, a review of the history of the U.S.-Cuban relationship helps place the story into context.
Quite literally, Fidel Castro has haunted every Administration since Eisenhower. The White House under President Bill Clinton fell into the same chasm that had brought over 30 years of official policy on Cuba to a near stalemate. This inaction was to Cuba's benefit.
For President Clinton, the issues of Cuban exiles and Cuban politics had personal ramifications. He was wary of Cuban rafter issues based on his own direct experiences. He had endured a Castro-inspired political slap during his 1980 gubernatorial loss in Arkansas, a loss that was directly attributed to the rioting of Cuban refugees from the Mariel boatlift who were being held in Fort Chaffee. Years later, Clinton entered the White House partly indebted to six of Miami's most powerful leaders in the Cuban community, leaders that helped him raise huge sums of money for his election bid.
Members of that group, dubbed the "Core Group" by senior Clinton aides, included Maria Victoria Arias, a Miami lawyer married to Hugh Rodham, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's brother; a wealthy Miami businessman, White House sleepover pal, Paul Cejas; and Democratic activist Simon Ferro. The socially recognized clan would meet at the posh Colonnade Hotel in Miami's elite Coral Gables neighborhood and in Little Havana's famous Cuban restaurant, La Versailles, to discuss "community issues" and draw up a consensus on policy matters. Arias was known to call First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton regularly on Cuban exile matters. She often sent the President clippings from the Florida newspapers designed to keep him abreast of the Cuban community's politics.
Yet despite such key relationships, including financial support, President Clinton and his advisors were torn between competing policy agendas.
Well into the Clinton's first term and with visions of a second term bolstered by Miami's Cuban voters, the "Core Group" convinced President Clinton of an assured victory by maintaining a firm anti-Castro position, one that was publicly perceived to be greater than that maintained by Presidents Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush.
Unfortunately, Clinton's Cuba policy was divided between the wishes of the "Core Group" and those of senior State Department diplomats who had high hopes Clinton would improve and renew U.S.-Cuban relations.
Even though Clinton was briefed early on by the CIA about Cuba's social instability in regards to the length of his term, when presidential aides pressed the agency to secretly fund Cuban dissidents, the CIA summarily rejected and abandoned the idea, having already lost in the game of dirty tricks with Castro in the 1960s.
The dramatic rise in the number of Cuban rafters taking to sea in the early 1990s served as an increasingly obvious indicator of newly emerging social strife on the island. The arrival of more and more rafters, culminating in the mass exodus of the mid-1990s, became yet another factor that pushed Clinton's Cuba policies to become torn between moderates who wanted to end the long standing Cuban embargo and his Administration's hardliners.
By 1994, Clinton's foreign policy on Cuba was as varied and confused as the reasons behind the mass rafter exodus that was then occurring. Castro had again managed to influence U.S. policy through a sophisticated strategy of permitting 33,000 of his citizens to flee to the sea towards South Florida on board rafts -- turning immigration into a weapon against the United States. Allowing the rafters to depart also served as a "safety valve," allowing Castro to rid himself of many of the most problematic freedom seekers while concurrently painting the U.S. Government's policy into a corner on accepting refugees from Cuba.
Rather than holding to a hard line policy, the Clinton White House instead rewarded Fidel Castro for his efforts by reversing a decades' old law that universally granted Cuban's the right to apply for asylum once they defected to freedom in America. The new Clinton rule created the so-called "wet foot, dry foot" policy of sending back to Cuba those found at sea, but allowing those who made it to dry land in the U.S.A. to stay. As for the rafters who came in the mass exodus, the Clinton Administration chose to detain them at the United States Naval Base in Guantanamo, where they remained for months and months, at great cost to U.S. taxpayers, even if many had waiting families in Miami. Only after coordinating their decision with Cuba itself, were those refugees allowed to finally come to the United States.
The Clinton Administration's ability to make clear decisions regarding Cuba were further corrupted by the carefully distilled intelligence data it received, which was filtered by Cuba's own intelligence agency through its operatives like La Red Avispa and Ana Belén Montes. The legacy of their activities remains to this day -- where the Cubans used to be called political refugees and freedom seekers, the Clinton Administration pioneered a new vocabulary, terming them instead, "migrants" and "economic migrants" -- terms which remain in use today. This new terminology made it easier to weigh the issue against anti-immigration sentiments as opposed to the previously applied yardstick of America's role in opening the door to freedom for those who escaped from behind the Iron Curtain. In one "fell swoop" the Clinton administration changed their status from political refugees risking death to escape Castro's Cuba to simple illegal migrant laborers looking for work "under the table."
Years later, during an interview for the movie, "Shootdown," Clinton's senior Cuba advisor, Richard Nuccio, stated, "From one day to the next, by a decision of President Clinton, Cubans were no longer political refugees. They were now to be treated like refugees from any other country in the world. An assumption was made that they were coming to the United States for economic reasons and they would have to prove a well-founded fear of persecution if they were returned to Cuba, in order to be granted political refugee status." He went on to say, "This was the biggest change in the relationship between the United States Government and the people of Cuba since the revolution itself had occurred. And it was made, frankly, without a lot of thought. Whatever your opinion on these changes on the part of the Clinton Administration in immigration policy, the actual reason for Brothers to the Rescue disappeared."
Thus, in 1994, Castro had already taken a major shot against the mission of Brothers to the Rescue. Yet even such an extraordinary policy shift as had taken place did not derail the group from its primary mission of saving lives -- people were still dying and thus, the pilots continued to fly. For others, it didn't seem to make sense to keep flying because any refugees that the group located were only going to be returned to the island, to face the wrath of the Cuban Government. Thus, as unpalatable as it seemed, with the Clinton Administration's new policy, the U.S. Coast Guard had inadvertently become an active enforcer of Cuban policy, hunting down and returning those who were attempting to escape Cuba.
While these shifts were happening, Hillary Rodham Clinton's sister-in-law, from her position as a member of the "Core Group," pressed for the President to stand firm on the Cuban embargo and tighten restrictions on Castro. The "Core Group" called for the President to halt charter airline flights to the island. Concurrently, State Department moderates increased pressure on the President to maintain informal exchanges, including the charter flights to the island, and normalize relations with the communist dictator. The effectiveness of both policies was considered based on reports and data provided by none other than Ana Belén Montes, from her position as the senior briefer on Cuban issues to the U.S. Government.
Morton Halperin at the National Security Council attempted to placate the warring factions by circulating a draft presidential speech that offered Fidel Castro rewards for adopting certain reforms. These reforms of the current embargo were refuted by the Administration's hardliners and eventually dropped from the speech text.
Meanwhile, Clinton's Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, Michael Skol, mustered the hardliners in Washington and led them to an alliance with the "Core Group" who launched a bureaucratic blockade to protect against any conciliatory moves. This brought Clinton back into line with them.
By January 1995, Clinton was again being squeezed by Washington insiders to ease tensions with Havana and release the 20,000 remaining rafter refugees being housed at Guantanamo Bay. General John Sheehan, then chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, warned the President of the possibility of riots at the facility, reminding Clinton of the nightmare from his days as governor in Arkansas -- events he was not ready to relive, particularly with his reelection campaign looming on the horizon.
Deriding the estimated two billion dollar cost to maintain Guantanamo, Administration moderates began plotting anew to hijack Clinton's Cuba policy. They cited the cost of maintaining the camp as warranting a change in repatriation policies.
Secret negotiations began between Under Secretary of State Peter Tarnoff and Ricardo Alarcón, president of Cuba's legislature. With the President's approval, the two reached an agreement. The Guantanamo refugees would be moved to Florida and any further "migrants" intercepted at sea by the United State Coast Guard would be returned to Cuba on the condition that they would not be punished. To that end, despite years of evidence of persecution and even of the murder of captured rafters, the U.S. Government made no significant efforts to verify Castro's compliance with that latter requirement.
To achieve success, with the U.S. position tenuous and Tarnoff fearful of having the talks scuttled before an agreement could be reached, Tarnoff and Halperin had attempted to deliver a decision memo to the President on three separate occasions, hoping to gain his approval on moving forward in the arrangement with Cuba.
Finally, Clinton relented. The President also agreed to keep the discussions secret from the "Core Group." When the time came to finalize the accord, Tarnoff had his wife covertly book his airline tickets to Toronto so he and Alarcón could meet and sign the documents, thus avoiding detection of their liaison.
Once the accord was made public, Clinton's "Core Group" was outraged. They retaliated by pressing the President to fire Halperin, while using their political power and reach to hover over every aspect of Clinton's Cuba policy from that day forward.
In the months that followed, conservatives pressed policy issues that drew the U.S. democracy and Castro's communist dictatorship closer towards crisis. In the meantime, Clinton paid dearly from his political missteps in failing to manage the public face of his Administration's backdoor diplomatic efforts and the new refugee policy.
The Tarnoff-Halperin deal also profoundly changed the scope of the Brothers to the Rescue mission. With rafters being repatriated to Guantanamo and then onward back into Cuba, the group's mission had to change. A part of its focus shifted to supporting rafters being held in limbo in Bahamian facilities -- not approved to enter the U.S.A. while concurrently not allowed to stay in the Bahamas. They began collecting and flying supplies to them.
Over the months that followed, the group developed a new policy for what to do when it found rafters at sea. They would drop radios and ask the group if they needed assistance, clearly explaining that if they were rescued at sea, they would be repatriated to Cuba. In this manner, they could continue their key goal of saving lives while not running afoul of U.S. immigration laws that disallowed assistance to those who were trying to illegally enter the United States. Thus, the Cubans would be able to call for rescue -- even if it meant that they would be repatriated to Cuba -- hopefully before anyone had to die at sea.
Jose Basulto, the group's leader, later recalled the decision to keep flying and its rationale, despite the new rules. His decision reveals much of the true motivation of the group, which remained, first and foremost, an effort to save lives.
Basulto recalled that once the policy changed, "We figured that we were doing more damage than good. We did not want to be instrumental in assisting Castro in patrolling the borders of Cuba on his behalf, but we still had the mission to save their lives. So for some time to come, we kept flying and dropping the radios, we asked them whether their situation was so precarious that they needed the assistance of the Coast Guard no matter what, even though they would be sent back to Cuba, or not, and that was their choice."
In effect, Brothers to the Rescue focused on its original mission -- that of saving lives -- by offering a little bit of a safety net to those attempting to row to the U.S.A. If you didn't make it to freedom, at least you didn't have to die.
Basulto also recalled the purpose of the group. "Brothers to the Rescue had three primary missions -- number one, to save lives in the Straits of Florida; number two, to give a message of solidarity to the people of Cuba that we, the exile community, had not abandoned them; and number three, to expose the Government of Cuba for the conditions that made it necessary for those people to jump on a raft."
He continued, "We were sending literature into Cuba on how they could organize themselves to oppose that government in an effective way. We were promoting non-violence in Cuba as an instrument of change."
Basulto's vision also changed to wishing that the rafters would remain in Cuba, in hopes that they would effect a change from within. His energies started to focus on bringing an end to the rafter crisis by bringing about change within Cuba itself. Soon, his voice was frequently heard on television and radio, including those beamed into Cuba, calling for non-violent resistance and change on the island.
To address the Clinton's new policies head on, Basulto also began a campaign of what amounted to airborne civil disobedience as a means of protesting the President's policies. To that end, Basulto made two incursions over Cuban waters. These acts brought the Cubans to deliver written letters of protest to the State Department and to the United States Interest Section in Havana. However, those initial protests went ignored by the U.S. Government.
On July 17, 1995, Basulto and a copilot brought a cameraman from the local Miami NBC TV affiliate along on a low-level flight directly over downtown Havana. With the camera rolling, they dropped pamphlets and religious medals to the streets below. Film of that flight made the local prime time evening news, adding to Basulto's status as something of a hero in the Cuban community and further infuriating Fidel Castro.
This time, the Federal Aviation Administration threatened Basulto with revocation of his pilot's license; their goal being to ground him, either temporarily or permanently. Yet the determined aviator fought back and won, legally maintaining his right to fly. As a Cuban, he maintained his right to fly where he wished, so long as he flew to the standards of the Federal Aviation Regulations which, not surprisingly, didn't include any sections outlawing such a flight. Ultimately, it seemed that the FAA had no legal action to pursue.
In January of 1996, Basulto changed tactics again, having learned from his experience with the FAA and not wanting to create enemies in Washington. Rather than over flying Cuba, he utilized meteorology, math, geometry, and a little luck to drop 500,000 leaflets over Havana. He scheduled two flights to coincide with Florida's seasonal cold fronts, which meant that the normally southerly winds would be replaced by northerlies, giving him the winds he needed to carry the leaflets to Cuba when dropped from far offshore from a higher altitude.
This second flight was to be his last leaflet dropping mission.
For all of the public discourse that followed about Basulto's acts on those two days dropping leaflets, it is important to recognize that the Brothers to the Rescue group had flown up over 500 missions a year for nearly six years straight -- in other words, thousands of humanitarian search and rescue missions with many thousands of lives saved. Yet these acts were somehow balanced unequally against what amounted to just a few truly political flights -- perhaps this was yet again the influence of the Cuban spy, Ana Montes, who at the time was also reporting on various highly placed sources that "confirmed" that Basulto and Brothers to the Rescue were preparing for armed incursions and violent acts against Cuba.
In accordance with the Federal Aviation Regulations, for this last leaflet dropping flight, Basulto even took the FAA required precautions to ensure that nobody on the ground would be endangered by his airdrop. It didn't require much to comply with the regulations, as any bundle of leaflets that didn't break up when dropped would simply fall rapidly straight down, impacting the water harmlessly below. The small, individual leaflets fluttering slowly down in the wind could not pose any serious threat to anyone below, even if they happened to hit someone or stick to the window of a car that might, if somewhat infrequently, be seen driving on Cuba's streets.
After weeks of waiting, finally the wind conditions were right. Basulto flew his plane to a fairly high altitude and simply dumped the leaflets out the cockpit window. Separating from bundled stacks into individual leaflets, they began to spin and flutter down slowly downward, drifting south toward Cuba in the wind. Previously, in a small test tossing the leaflets from a Miami bridge, he had timed the average rate at which they would fall once dropped from the plane and how fast they would float horizontally in the wind. Now, by computing the descent rate against the wind speed from the FAA's forecast weather report, he was able to eject the leaflet packages into the skies well north and outside of Havana's 12-mile territorial waters and pray that the wind would carry them all the way to the island, fairly confident that at least some of them would reach the island nation. Even if it was an imprecise method, the winds carried the leaflets until they eventually fluttered down through a cloud layer over Cuba.
Against all odds, they dropped right onto the streets of Havana.
Basulto was astonished at his success -- he had expected to miss Cuba's capital city entirely. Later, shaking his head, he would comment that God must have had a hand in it.
His leaflets, far from carrying the provocative rhetoric that Castro would later claim, bore nothing more than some of the text from the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
While this latest act of airborne civil disobedience may have had its roots in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s non-violent resistance philosophies, Basulto also knew full well that he was playing at dangerous politics. Fidel Castro's reputation of ruthlessness is nearly legendary and his will to retaliate was self-evident. Nonetheless, Basulto stood firm in his right to engage in such activities, even if at the same time, he seemed to have no intention of making leaflet dropping a regular practice.
The leaflet drops had only very symbolic value and were, on face value, even less effective and less of a threat to Castro than the U.S. Government's own Radio Marti, which routinely broadcast messages about liberty and freedom into Cuba. Additionally, Basulto was increasingly focused more on what he considered to be the unacceptable change in the Clinton Administration policy toward Cuban refugees. To many Cuban-Americans, sending those who escaped Cuba's communist state back to Fidel Castro was seen as nothing less than appalling.
Moreover, Basulto's political acts were far from routine; simply put, they had no pattern. His politically motivated flights were far from a major problem for Cuba and at most, were a small nuisance. A greater focus would have to be on changing the policies of the Clinton Administration which would have to make a stand on the issue. At some point, what Cuban-Americans saw as the blatant injustice of "wet foot, dry foot" policy would have to be reversed.
However, Fidel Castro proved to be incensed far beyond any rationality. In retrospect, it is clear that Castro's enmity toward Basulto was mixed with his increasing concern for other "copy cat" groups, like the Democracia Movement. He was also growing agitated in the year before the shootdown by the emergence within Cuba itself of the non-violent organizations of the Concilio Cubano which, even if small and nascent, were rapidly coming to the attention of the activists in Europe and the United States. Many groups within the network of the Concilio Cubano openly stated that they were inspired by the Brothers to the Rescue vision of bringing about change through non-violent resistance.
In response, Castro threatened to use deadly force unless Basulto's flights ceased immediately, which he called on the U.S. Government to ensure at once. Put simply, Castro was demanding that the U.S. Government force an end to Basulto's flying -- or he would do it himself.
When queried, however, the FAA responded that it had no right to put a stop to his flying. The United States is a free country where the rule of law presides. In a dictatorship, it was easy to simply order someone not fly and, if they didn't comply, imprison them or have them killed. However, the FAA had no right to do anything more than implement U.S. law and monitor Basulto's compliance with the Federal Aviation Regulations, which he had not truly violated.
In an ominous development later that month, the U.S. intelligence agencies spotted Cuban Air Force MiG jet fighters test-firing missiles and practicing maneuvers to attack a slow moving, low altitude light aircraft -- a Polish-built Wilga, a single engine, high wing aircraft similar in its flight characteristics to those flown by Brothers to the Rescue airplanes. The Wilga was even observed to be flying at altitudes and tracks similar to those flown by the Brothers' planes. Nonetheless, even when considering this ominous bit of data, senior officials at the State Department still did not apparently truly believe Castro would attack -- after all, Basulto's organization was a humanitarian operation and was in no way a real threat to Cuba -- moreover, the frequency of idle threats from Havana had dulled the attention of the leadership, who no longer took Fidel Castro seriously.
General John J. Sheehan, who was then serving as the head of the Atlantic Command, was interviewed for the movie, "Shootdown," and recalled, "There was a demarche -- a series of demarches -- that was done through the U.S. Interests Section, and I think as a matter of fact, it was even spoken to Rick Nuccio, who was the President's Special Advisor to Cuba at the time. But in terms of the consequences, 'I would shoot them down,' I don't ever remember hearing that and if it was said, it would have been lost in the rhetoric. When Fidel Castro says, 'I warned you, I warned you, I warned you,' the system stopped taking him seriously because he's been saying things like that for 40 years. You don't know what is what I would call 'revolutionary rhetoric' and what's real warnings."
Meanwhile, additional warnings were issued through various official and unofficial U.S. diplomats, who continued the Clinton Administration's unpublicized, back-channel negotiations within Cuba itself. Fidel Castro even met with New Mexico's governor Bill Richardson, who would later become a prospective candidate for the 2008 Democratic Party Presidential nomination and considered for the position of Secretary of State in the Obama Administration before being ultimately selected for a cabinet-level position as Secretary of Commerce.
For his part, Governor Richardson boasts an impressive political resume. His life's many accomplishments include his being the 2004 Chairman of the Democratic National Convention, having served as former Secretary of Energy, as former Ambassador to the United Nations, and having been formerly elected as U.S. Representative of Congress. As an interesting aside which demonstrates Richardson's close and personal ties with the Clintons, according to his autobiography, Richardson was asked by the White House in 1997 to interview Monica Lewinsky for a job on his staff at the United Nations when it became apparent to the President that Monica had to be moved onward and out of the White House. Richardson did so, and offered her a position, which she declined.
During Richardson's tenure as Secretary of Energy, he had seen his share of international intrigue and politics as well, having been at the helm when the Wen Ho Lee nuclear espionage scandal erupted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In July 2005, a Federal judge was rumored to have alleged that Richardson had leaked Lee's name to reporters months before the scientist was charged with any crime. Richardson was also sharply criticized by the Senate for his handling of the espionage inquiry. During Senate questioning, Senator Robert Byrd (Democrat-W.Va.) scolded Richardson, stating, "You've... shown a contempt of Congress that borders on a supreme arrogance.... You will never again receive the support of the Senate of the United States for any office to which you might be appointed."
Richardson also had a short-lived, yet unique political partnership with Peter Bourne, a Washington insider who, like John Kerry, returned from Vietnam and became active in the anti-war movement. Bourne and Richardson began working together on diplomatic matters in 1995.
Bourne is reported to be a "physician, biologist, biographer, author and international civil servant with experience in several senior government positions." He has also been described as a "self-appointed ambassador to the world's rogue nations." In many ways, Richardson and Bourne seemed to share that title, with Richardson seeing it as his high duty to reach out to Fidel Castro on behalf of the Clinton Administration.
Peter Bourne was the first Director of the National Drug Control Policy, the nation's so-called "drug czar," during the Carter Administration. He eventually resigned from that position under a cloud when the director of NORML leaked a story that Bourne had snorted cocaine in 1977 at the NORML Christmas party with Hunter S. Thompson and David Kennedy.
For his part, despite that history, Richardson found Bourne adept at navigating Washington's bureaucratic waters as well as the United States' muddy relationships with various rogue nations around the world. The pair had several successes, including negotiating the return of two American aerospace workers from Iraq after they wandered over the Kuwaiti border. As well, they collaborated on numerous other behind-the-scenes efforts in Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kenya and North Korea.
Richardson and Bourne turned their diplomatic focus toward Havana even as Clinton's Cuba policy continued on its schizophrenic path towards what would ultimately be yet another dismal failure -- and it should be noted that the U.S. policy toward Cuba can be viewed as a 40 year failed policy. In that light, it's not surprising that the Clinton Administration's efforts were neither more nor less successful than any of his predecessors'.
For some time, Gov. Richardson had repeatedly been invited to the island by Cuban officials. Finally, he made the first of two trips to Havana, both in January 1996, where he met with Fidel Castro and other government officials.
Richardson's trip immediately created anger in the Miami exile community. The Exiles were still reeling from the backdoor dealings on Cuban issues by then Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff and National Security Council staffer Morton Halperin, who had led the Clinton Administration's charge to change more than 30 years of steadfast U.S. policy on how to handle Cuban refugees. In 1995, the two had saddled up the issue of Castro's mass refugee exodus with the anti-immigration mood that was sweeping the country.
It didn't matter that the U.S. had long stood as a beacon of hope and freedom to those attempting to escape communism. It didn't matter that in a typical year, no more than perhaps 3,500 Cubans would survive the crossing to freedom -- in a whole year less than the number of illegal immigrants coming across in a single weekend from Mexico, few, if any of whom were political refugees.
Tarnoff and Halperin had succeeded in changing the policy to the new "wet-foot, dry-foot" rule, which resulted in the repatriation to Cuba of those rescued at sea. Somehow, the United States had altered its policies so as to help Cuba keep its own people trapped on the island, without hope.
It was into this rocky political landscape that Gov. Richardson ventured as he headed off to Havana to meet with Fidel Castro and his senior aides.
In a direct statement that served as a clear message on just how the Miami exile community would see Richardson's negotiating efforts, Jorge Mas Canosa, founder and leader of the powerful Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), said that if Clinton was "negotiating behind the backs of Americans and Cuban exiles," it would be "shameful."
Richardson first arrived in Havana on January 17, 1996, accompanied by the senior counsel to the House Intelligence Committee, Calvin Humphrey. Prior to the trip, Humphrey underwent extensive briefings from officials at the State Department, the National Security Counsel and various intelligence agencies. Similarly, to help prepare and coordinate his efforts, Richardson spoke with Richard Nuccio, Clinton's senior Cuba policy advisor.
The Cubans responded by sending some of their highest officials to meet with Richardson, including Ricardo Alarcón, Carlos Lage, the Cuban economics chief, and General Rozales del Toro, the Chief of Staff of the Cuban military. There was no doubt that, judging from the seniority of the individuals representing Cuba at the meetings, Fidel Castro meant business and was very serious about his negotiations.
Richardson spoke in Spanish while Humphrey utilized an interpreter. Together, the men engaged in a lengthy discussion directly with Fidel Castro himself that lasted until two o'clock the next morning.
Cuban Vice President Ricardo Alarcón would later relate his view of what he tried to achieve in these meetings as it regarded Brothers to the Rescue. He stated, "We gave plenty of time to their masters, to the authorities who should have controlled them, who recognized that those activities were not justifiable to simply, not to do anything in our favor, but just to implement, to respect their own laws and regulations.
At the same time, Saul Landau, the well-known journalist, was also called in for meetings. Landau remembers that, "Vice President Alarcón called Scott Armstrong and I in on one of our trips to Cuba to give us a message to deliver to Mort Halperin. And the message was a clear and distinct warning emphasizing the gravity of the overflights and that the Cubans would not permit any more to take place."
On the third and final day of their stay in Cuba, Richardson and Castro, both one-time talented ballplayers, attended a Cuban baseball game. Richardson is quoted in a New Yorker Magazine article written by Carl Nagin and entitled "Backfire" as saying, "We talked an hour about baseball." In the article, Richardson recalls teasing Castro about his team not having any pitchers, only great hitters. As for the over flights, Richardson is quoted as saying two weeks after the downing of the planes, "When I met with him he (Castro) warned me about these overflights and he wanted to do something about them."
What Humphrey and Richardson didn't know was that prior to their meetings in Cuba, after the Brothers to the Rescue leaflets fell from the sky on January 13, Fidel Castro had already issued orders to his air force to shoot down any plane even suspected of illegally entering Cuban airspace. In other words, the Cuban Air Force had the green light to start preparing to shoot down the Brothers' planes, even if they didn't actually fly into Cuban airspace -- the suspicion of intent to undertake such an act alone would serve as sufficient justification.
Some years later, it was reported that Richardson and Bourne ended their informal diplomatic partnership and possibly their friendship as well. They also reportedly seem to have very different opinions on what transpired during Richardson's meetings with Cuban leaders. Today, the men even disagree on whether or not they had executive branch approval for their Cuban mission.
Bourne claims having direct approval from President Clinton, as well as the approval of Clinton's National-Security Advisor, then Anthony Lake, and even the approval of other intelligence advisors within the Administration. Richardson reportedly once acknowledged in a radio interview that the President, the Secretary of State and others had been cooperative, but insisted the executive branch was not involved in his efforts in Cuba.
Richardson also denies meeting privately with Fidel Castro when Castro addressed the United Nations General Assembly on October 22, 1995, a soapbox he used to denounce the impending Helms-Burton Act, which strengthened the U.S. embargo against Cuba. Nonetheless, the Miami Herald reported in an article on October 27, 1995, that, "Two influential Democrats, Representatives Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Joe Moakley of Massachusetts, met separately with Castro on Tuesday night" (October 241995).
At the time, there were other unofficial channels and trips to Cuba. A delegation of retired Pentagon and diplomatic officials also visited Cuba on February 5 through 9, 1996, according to a letter written to Congressman Dan Burton, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, authored by and from John J. Shanahan, Vice Admiral, United States Navy (Retired) and the Director of the Center for Defense Information.
That group included:
• Eugene J. Carroll, Jr., Rear Admiral, United States Navy (Retired) and Deputy Director, Center for Defense Information
• Robert White, President, Center for International Policy, former United States Ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay
• Jack Mendelsohn, Deputy Director, Arms Control Association and former Deputy Assistant Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
• Stephen S. Sapienza, Investigative Journalist, America's Defense Monitor, PBS Stations
• Glenn Baker, Writer/Producer, America's Defense Monitor, PBS Stations
• Ira M. Shor, Senior Producer, America's Defense Monitor, PBS Stations
• Edward Atkeson, Major General, United States Army (Retired)
• William Lanagan, Brigadier General, United States Marine Corps (Retired)
• Ralph Weymouth, Vice Admiral, United States Navy (Retired)
The delegation intended to meet with top military officials in Havana to discuss post Cold War era relations. However, instead and much to their surprise, the Cubans focused on the subject of Brothers to the Rescue and the overflights, despite the fact that by that date, the overflights had already ceased.
At the meeting, Cuban cosmonaut and Air Force General Arnaldo Tomayo went so far as to directly ask Ambassador White about the reaction of the U.S. Military should Cuba shoot down one of the Brothers to the Rescue airplanes. Properly recognizing the import of the question, Ambassador White took it as a carefully worded, premeditated warning of Cuba's intentions directly from one of the heads of the Cuban armed forces. He interpreted General Tomayo's question as meaning that the Cubans had reached their limits in tolerating the Brothers to the Rescue over flights and were ready to take hostile action. As such, Cuba's question was likely designed to start the process of coordinating the aftermath of the shootdown with the United States and setting the tone and expectations for the resulting official statements that would be issued after Cuba took such hostile action.
While others in the Ambassador's position may have taken the time to convey in the strongest possible terms that such an action -- shooting down American civilian airplanes -- would likely bring a very sharp response from the United States, instead Ambassador Wilson said little. Perhaps his lack of a sharp response was in part due to his diplomatic training. Rather, it seems that he chose to convey the Cuban's question about the shootdown back to the Clinton Administration for their more direct response. He probably considered it best that the Clinton Administration itself develop a more carefully considered reply, particularly in that as a retired ambassador, he had no authority to state or define U.S. policy.
On the Cuban side, however, the near silence of the delegation when faced with such a direct, unambiguous question was likely taken as a green light to the shootdown itself. The most that was said by any of the members of the delegation was that the shootdown would be a public relations disaster for Cuba and would further serve to endorse the validity of the views shared by hardliners within Miami's exile community.
Incredibly, by focusing on the fallout of the event, rather than on the horrific, unacceptable act of the shootdown itself, the delegation of retired military men was essentially fostering Cuba's view that the event itself was seen as palatable to both sides, even if unwittingly. Thus, the Cubans likely concluded that the focus of future discussions would be on managing the political fallout from the shootdown. Their focus then seemed to shift somewhat to considering how to best develop coordinated statements from both sides of the Straits of Florida.
For Cuba, the statements of retired military men seemingly held great validity, even if in real terms, under the U.S. way of doing things, once retired, the men had no official standing, no real duties and no right to represent the positions of the U.S. Government, except if directed by the President on a case-by-case basis.
Cuba also likely interpreted the delegations response to mean that this would need to involve efforts to contain the exile hardliners, which therefore were obviously not in favor with the White House either -- a conclusion that they were already prone to draw from the changes made to the U.S.'s longstanding policy on accepting Cuban refugees. The Clinton Administration, at the time, had only just changed the policy and, as a result, were rescuing Cubans and repatriating them back into the hands of Fidel Castro.
After a full round of discussions, Ambassador White and the entourage left Havana on February 9. Coincidently, that same day, Bill Richardson returned for his second visit to Havana, from which he returned on February 10, accompanied by three prisoners that were released to him by Castro. As seen from Cuba's side, this was likely seen as a further sign that Fidel Castro was now negotiating in good faith with the Clinton Administration.
Following his return to Washington, Ambassador White was debriefed at the State Department and by Defense Intelligence Agency officials where he and another official in the delegation told Defense Intelligence that they had to stop Basulto's flight or an incident was going to occur. Naturally, the official report was then filtered through DIA's senior Cuba briefer, the Cuban spy Ana Belén Montes.
Even after having been directly notified of the threat by Ambassador White, it appears that nobody in the Clinton Administration made any efforts to convey a formal, official and very harsh response to Cuba. This subsequent silence on the part of the Clinton Administration itself is shocking. Most astute observers with experience in international affairs would concur that the Cuban's question and statement regarding the shootdown should have deserved the full attention of the White House -- it isn't every day that a foreign power makes a direct threat to kill American citizens and, by implication, essentially asks for the permission of the President of the United States to do so.
It is quite likely that this further silence from the White House instead only further confirmed the Cubans belief that the Brothers to the Rescue organization had few supporters in Washington. It appeared that the disinformation campaign through Castro's spy, Ana Belén Montes, had gained considerable traction -- and Havana itself probably overplayed its hand in that regard, concluding that their efforts were entirely and unequivocally effective. The Cubans, it would seem, were prone to conclude that perhaps the Clinton White House was willing to look the other way if Cuba handled the problem of Brothers to the Rescue in the most aggressive fashion.
Another member of White's delegation, Eugene J. Carroll, Jr., a retired Rear Admiral in the United States Navy and Deputy Director, Center for Defense Information, further reiterated White's fears when he was interviewed by CNN on February 25, 1996, the day after the Brothers shootdown. Admiral Carroll is quoted saying:
"In long discussions with General Rozales del Toro and his staff the question came up about these overflights from U.S. aircraft, not government aircraft, but private airplanes operating out of Miami.
"They asked us, 'What would happen if we shot one of these down? We can you know.'"
Carroll said he responded to the question telling the Cubans, "It would be a public relations disaster. Every hardliner in the United States, particularly in a presidential election year, will shout and scream that this is proof of the violent regime in Cuba and that we have to get tougher with them."
CNN Anchor Catherine Callaway posed her next question, "You considered this a clear warning, so when you returned who did you relay this information to?"
To which Carroll replied, "As soon as we could make appointments, we discussed the situation, and a lot of other things besides just this issue with members of the State Department and members of the Defense Intelligence Agency." Despite the urgency of the information, it is interesting to note that the appointments Admiral Carroll speaks of took almost two weeks to schedule in what would later turn out to be a scheduling matter which was deftly handled by the DIA's senior Cuba briefer, Ana Belén Montes. It is known now that Montes had manipulated the dates of the briefings to best coincide with the scheduled shootdown. Her scheduling action was a part of a larger influence campaign designed to garner public support for Cuba's actions.
When asked what the U.S. response was to his briefing, Carroll replied, "More of the same. You know as long as last July (1995), the Cubans were threatening to shoot down these airplanes. They actually put some anti-aircraft in position to do it."
When the news anchor asked Carroll if the State Department had issued other warnings to the Brothers to the Rescue, Carroll replied, "Not effective ones. You could hear it in the statement of the presidential spokesman McCurry yesterday. He (McCurry) said, 'We do not accept flight plans indicating Cuba as a destination.'"
Carroll continued the interview calling McCurry's statement "weak."
Further, on face value alone, McCurry's statement about his claim that the FAA didn't accept flight plans to Cuba was obviously flawed.
Of all the people who had traveled to Cuba in the weeks preceding the shootdown and who had heard Cuba's shootdown question raised, none took the time to alert Jose Basulto. Additionally, of those officials in the United States who were briefed about the situation, none of them took the initiative either. The simple fact that they chose not to pass a warning to Brothers to the Rescue is, in and of itself, astonishing -- in short, the U.S Government had been warned by the Cubans that the shootdown was to take place, and despite such a clear, direct warning the Clinton Administration remained silent both to the Cubans and to the Brothers to the Rescue pilots themselves.
Ultimately, the man who most likely could have stopped Brothers to the Rescue from flying that day, had he answered his phone or checked his e-mail in the final hours of February 23, was none other than Sandy Berger.
Samuel (Sandy) Berger was President Clinton's Deputy National Security Advisor on the day of the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. Subsequently, Berger was promoted to also serve as National Security Advisor from 1997 through 2001.
Berger's biography details the life of a man of great intelligence and political savvy, even if his actions over the years also have proven to have included several major indiscretions. The record of his indiscretions is interesting to review in this context.
In November 1997, while National Security Advisor, Berger reportedly paid a $23,000 fine to settle conflict of interest allegations from his failure to sell his stock in Amoco Corporation as he was ordered to do by the White House. He said he planned on selling the stock but then forgot to do so.
In 1999, Berger was criticized for failing to promptly inform President Clinton of his knowledge that the People's Republic of China had managed to acquire the designs of a number of U.S. nuclear warheads after he was briefed on the issue in April of 1996 -- Berger did not inform Clinton until July of 1997, fully fifteen months later.
Berger's biggest blunder however, involves his attempts to cover up and destroy documents relating to the events of September 11, 2001. On April 1, 2005, Berger pled guilty to the unauthorized removal and retention of classified material. The documents Berger removed were top secret classified paperwork taken from a National Archive reading room prior to testifying before the 9/11 Commission.
He initially claimed the removal of the actual documents in his attaché case and his concealment of handwritten notes in his jacket and pants was accidental. He later pled guilty, admitting to taking the documents, hiding them along a street, and later cutting them up with a pair of scissors, knowing that he was destroying what he thought to be unique copies of key working documents that were part of the official records of the United States Government.
To this day, people ask why someone of Berger's stature in government would be motivated to make such a move. Could it have been that Berger was trying to cover up Clinton era mistakes in terrorism polices?
One thing is certain: Berger's illicit activities and conviction bring his integrity into doubt. We are left to wonder just what Sandy Berger knew about the plot to shoot down the Brothers to the Rescue airplanes. And we are left to wonder why he has never been formally asked to explain the White House's position (or lack thereof) on this issue in testimony in Congress. And finally, given his clear record of past behavior, we are left to wonder if Sandy Berger may have been one of the major players in the attempts at covering up the facts in the aftermath of the shootdown.
The day before the attack on Brothers to the Rescue took place, Richard Nuccio, President Clinton's Cuba advisor, was so fearful of an immediate confrontation between Cuba and Brothers to the Rescue that he wrote an e-mail to Deputy National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. Nuccio sent the e-mail at 6:44 p.m. -- and, as is well-documented, e-mail messages sent to or within the White House are kept as part of the official record.
Nuccio also claims he attempted to call Sandy Berger several times that evening, both before and after he sent the note, but Berger was apparently busy with another crisis that took priority over Nuccio's phone calls.
White House spokesman P.J. Crowley confirms Berger received the Nuccio's note and states, "but he did not have a chance to read it that evening." This statement, however, is extraordinarily misleading -- at that level of public service, there are assistants and aides who regularly review the message traffic on behalf of their boss. One is left to wonder why none of the deputies, military aides or special assistants working for Sandy Berger took action to notify him or bring the extensive organizational reach of the National Security Council to bear on addressing the problem that Richard Nuccio was highlighting.
Fortunately, we have a chance to read the e-mail message now, just as Nuccio's note was read to a Miami Herald reporter from his own personal archived copy:
"Reports by Miami police have raised suspicions that a Cuban-American group, Brothers to the Rescue, may be planning another in a series of violations of Cuban air space tomorrow. Previous overflights by Jose Basulto....have been met with restraint by Cuban authorities. Tensions are sufficiently high within Cuba, however, that we feel this may finally tip the Cubans toward an attempt to shoot down or force down the planes."
"We only know for sure that Basulto... has filed a flight plan for the Bahamas. He has done this before and diverted to drop leaflets over Havana..."
"We have repeatedly tried to get FAA to act on the previous overflights without success. Informed of the possible overflight, Miami authorities have only agreed to issue another warning to him, if they encounter him."
"By our laws there may not be much more we can do."
Nuccio is quoted in the same Miami Herald article as saying exactly the opposite -- that no one thought the Cubans would shoot down the Brothers aircraft. Nonetheless, he also admitted it was a known fact that the Cubans were practicing "confronting slow-flying aircraft in the couple of months before the shootdown."
Years later, while being interviewed for the movie, "Shoot Down," Nuccio went so far as to totally revise his role in the events and lay out his own personal justification for why he feels that he was powerless to stop the events of the shootdown. First, he stated, "For someone who was trying to make an argument to the Cuban Government, that they should not fear free expression by their own citizens, it would be a strange thing for me to be trying to get U.S. citizens not to express their opinions about the Cuban Government."
Then, second, Nuccio stated, "But I believed that the activities of Brothers to the Rescue in the second half of 1995 were bordering on activities that had the potential to produce armed conflict between the U.S. Government and the Cuban Government. I thought that was a tragedy and something to which Brothers to the Rescue was not entitled by their Constitutional rights to free expression."
Third, Nuccio stated, "I did everything I could to try to deter Brothers to the Rescue from continuing its flights. I did so much that I was eventually ordered by the White House to stop speaking to Jose Basulto."
Fourth, Nuccio claimed, "In fact, the day of the shootdown, Mr. Basulto's license to fly was suspended. But under our government, citizens have a right to appeal decisions of the government, which I certainly believe they should have that right, and while you appeal a suspension of a pilot's license, you are free to continue to fly."
The latter point is flatly wrong -- it is a fabrication, but whether it is intentional on his part or not is unclear. Basulto's flight certificates were not suspended at that time and, as most pilots can readily attest, the FAA does not grant a pilot the right to fly during the appeals process of a suspension.
Finally, Nuccio noted, "On the Friday before the flight, and on the Saturday morning of the flight, I communicated with officials in the State Department, with our senior representative in Havana, and with FAA officials to try to send another strong message of discouragement to Brothers not to fly that day. Does that mean I knew the Cuban Government was going to shoot them down? No. Umm, because if I did, I think I would have stood outside the Oval Office and yelled and screamed until they carried me away because I don't think, I don't believe that if I'd known that four people were going to be murdered that day I would have gone home with an email sent. But I worried that it might happen."
Years later, attorney Leonard Weinglass representing Antonio Guerrero, part of the Cuban Five (all spies held behind bars for their activities on behalf of Cuba), stated in court that he had a memo from Nuccio from less than a month before the shootdown that ended in what he termed, "typical bureaucratic fashion" with the phrase, "We'd better have all of our ducks in a row, because people are going to get killed." Perhaps Nuccio wrote those words -- or perhaps not. Weinglass's record of accurately stating the facts is in question.
If Nuccio did write those words, it gives great insight into the thinking of a man who, it would appear, was (and perhaps still is) more interested in the "CYA" and cover-up than in accepting the responsibility, at least in small part, for what happened that day.
The record is clear that nobody notified Brothers to the Rescue of the danger they faced that day. Despite Nuccio's statement otherwise, and despite his clear record of strong support for the Cuban exile cause, in this case Nuccio, like so many officials and government workers, essentially did nothing.
At least seven radar stations in the U.S were put on watch early in the morning of February 24, trained on watching the Florida Straits north of Cuba. That this was not routine was confirmed in a letter dated September 5, 1996, to Congressman Dan Burton in a message from United States Air Force Brigadier General Howard G. DeWolf. General DeWolf stated, "Department of Defense radars do not routinely and systematically track civilian aircraft operating in international airspace."
In the years after the shootdown, numerous media reports and court transcripts have shown also that the amount of attention placed on monitoring the events of February 24, 1996, was not routine at all -- in fact, it amounted to a full-on, high priority monitoring of the airspace and flight activities of that day.
Some U.S. sites were apparently notified on the morning of the shootdown -- however, there is evidence that some other U.S. military installations were notified up to a week in advance to watch the Florida Straits based on when the Brothers flight plan was filed. Specific instructions were passed down the chain of command to Miami AIFSS and the control tower at Opa Locka Airport to coordinate all flight plans and departure time information with the Watch Supervisor. The Watch Supervisor (and/or a Military Liaison Specialist) was to track the Brothers transponder codes, take detailed notes and advise other facilities, including NORAD, SEADS, CARIBROC, and the MIAMI ARTCC, among others. The Brothers flight also was to be tracked by the aerostat radar balloon at Cudjoe Key that morning, thus giving the U.S. Government very high resolution, real time data of the precise positions, headings and altitudes of all flight activities over the Straits of Florida that day.
The evidence is overwhelming that even if the Clinton Administration did not choose to respond to Cuba regarding the warning to shoot down the planes, the military and other U.S. Government agencies took the threats seriously enough -- or at least the reports that the Brothers to the Rescue organization was attempting another political act which, in turn, would bring about an extraordinarily harsh response -- to literally light up the skies with intensive radar oversight.
It is also worth again noting that on the morning of the shootdown, USAF fighter jets from Homestead AFB in Florida were launched to intercept two Cuban MiGs that had come north of Cuba's coastline. The MiGs had taken off apparently on a mission to intercept the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft since their launch corresponded exactly with the projected arrival times of the Brothers' aircraft based on the organization's filed flight plans. The presence of the USAF fighters sent the MiGs scurrying back to their base in Cuba.
We also know now that Major Jeffery Houlihan testified that he called SEADS to notify them of the situation later in the afternoon as the shootdown unfolded, indicating that everyone from the United States own National Security Advisor down to those focused on monitoring radar had some prior knowledge that something may occur that day.
Peter Bourne was a member of the first group of Americans to visit Havana after the shootdown and to meet with Ricardo Alarcón and other Cuban officials. They told Bourne that Fidel Castro had told Richardson: "I am not releasing these prisoners for you. I am releasing them for President Clinton." To some, this odd statement had been delivered to intimate to the group that Castro felt he had assurances that the Brothers to the Rescue flight would be stopped.
Interestingly, years after the events, Gov. Richardson, while on the campaign trail as a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination in October 2007, made claim to having brought political prisoners out of Cuba. In doing so, he never mentioned the related shoot down of the Brothers to the Rescue planes nor Castro's statement that he wasn't releasing the prisoners because of anything that Richardson had said or done, but rather that he was releasing them to President Clinton.
The Cubans also claimed to Bourne that they had the same assurances from President Clinton through another channel but would not say who that person was. Fidel then told others that he had a clear commitment from "one head of state to another" that the Brothers to the Rescue flights would be stopped.
After the shootdown, Castro reiterated his understanding again in an interview with CBS News on April 30 saying one of his emissaries had received promises from the "highest levels" of the United States Government that there would be no more incursions by the Brothers to the Rescue airplanes into Cuban airspace.
Finally, Governor Bill Richardson told CNN that Castro asked for nothing in return for the release of the prisoners that he escorted back to the United States, which can possibly be seen to imply that the release was part of a greater understanding between the two countries on some other issue. Given the Castro's myopic focus on the Brothers to the Rescue, it may have been that Cuba felt that there was an established agreement on the issue.
Members of the Clinton Administration, his National Security Advisor, his Deputy National Security Advisor (Sandy Berger), and multiple diplomats, plus at least one a self-appointed diplomat (Gov. Richardson) and several retired military leaders have at times denied having any prior knowledge to the shootdown and yet have stated differently at different times over the years since.
To some, it seems as if the only people on the north side of the Florida Straits that day who didn't know of the events that were to follow were the pilots and crews from Brothers to the Rescue, including those killed -- Carlos Costa, Pablo Morales, Armando Alejandre, and Mario de la Peña.
Betrayal
After narrowly escaping death and landing safely back at Opa-Locka Airport, Jose Basulto taxied his plane back to the Brothers to the Rescue hangar. There, he was immediately met by a man claiming to be a U.S. Customs official. The man, whose identity has remained a mystery, demanded that Basulto hand over the taped conversations from his cockpit intercom voice recorder.
The fact that this small electronic device was in Basulto's plane was a little known fact. His aircraft was the only plane in the Brothers to the Rescue fleet to be equipped with such a device.
The tape recording contained within was valuable evidence of what had transpired that day. It included recordings of all radio transmissions with Havana's air traffic controllers as well as all of the transmissions between the planes -- including what amounted to the last words of the four men who were killed. The alleged agent said the tapes were not to be made public and he was taking them, as he said, "for safe keeping."
Despite his emotional state, Jose Basulto kept his wits about him and refused -- instead, he kept the tapes, opting to play them at his subsequent press conference where he first attempted to publicly prove that the Brothers to the Rescue planes were in international airspace when the attacks occurred.
The alleged agent has never been seen again and Federal authorities deny any knowledge of anyone being ordered to get custody of the tapes. To this day, Basulto wonders if the individual was another of Castro's spies in South Florida or if, despite the official denials, he was indeed working for the U.S. Government.
From the start, Basulto's possession of the taped evidence proved to be a problem for officials on both sides of the Florida Straits. Cuba and the United States were each independently working up their own versions of what had happened. As it would turn out later, both sides would bend the truth -- the U.S. only a little and largely through omission -- perhaps for reasons of security classification and in trying to avoid blame in the usual post-action finger pointing. For its part, Cuba bent the truth for its own purposes, literally beyond the breaking point into absurdity.
Despite the lack of a military reaction, the U.S. Government's political response to Cuba's attack was swift. When the planes were shot down, President Clinton was in Seattle. Immediately upon being informed of the news, the President issued a statement condemning the action "in the strongest possible terms." Subsequently, Clinton's Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, called Cuba's downing of civilian aircraft a "flagrant violation of international law." Taken together, these statements were a promising start.
The Clinton Administration pressed for new sanctions against Cuba and quickly ramped up support for the Helms-Burton Act, strengthening the U.S. embargo against Cuba. The President also asked Congress to permit him to use some of the approximately $100 million in frozen Cuban assets that were in the U.S. to compensate the families of the Cuban-American pilots.
Further, challenging the international community to take a stand on principle and for international security, the United States immediately called upon the United Nations Security Council to impose additional sanctions on Cuba. As part of that effort, the Administration produced documents that proved the two Brothers aircraft were over international waters when they were attacked. Those documents were the first of many that would turn out to be revelations about the full story of what took place that day. With the release of those documents and others that followed, it would become more and more apparent that officials in the Clinton Administration and law enforcement knew of the attacks in advance -- or at least of the elevated threat level the pilots of Brothers to the Rescue had unknowingly faced.
On the U.S. side, most of the few truly misleading statements were related to the question of who knew what and when. It appeared that for some their "CYA" effort (Washington lingo for avoiding any blame) was nearly equal to the energy they expended on developing policy options and responses to the events themselves.
Court documents show conclusively that many military facilities had been briefed in advance that the rescue group would possibly be attempting some sort of aerial "political action" on February 24, 1996. Yet the Brothers group itself had had no such extraordinary plan -- the day's missions were typical search and rescue flights of the sort that the group had routinely flown in the past about 500 times each year. In retrospect, it is likely that the false information about the supposed aerial "political action" came from Juan Pablo Roque himself, a tip that was no doubt picked up and emphasized by Ana Belén Montes.
Therefore, based on Roque's "tip" and other supporting data planted by Cuban intelligence, the U.S. had turned its attention to the Straits of Florida that day -- not because they knew they were going to watch outright murder, but rather to document what they expected to be a transgression on the part of the Brothers to the Rescue group and Cuba's likely violent response. Some knew that the planes would likely be shot down, but they expected that the shooting would take place over Havana, where there was little they could do short of ordering the USAF to fly into Cuban airspace in what was sure to turn into a major international incident.
Yet the evidence was also there for the Clinton Administration to conclude that something far more sinister was afoot -- after all, the Cubans had been observed practicing the shootdown and had given clear, advance warning of their intentions. Somehow, those in Washington seemed to consider that they were powerless to avert the disaster. Like so many paralytic politicians, they instead simply stood by and watched it all happen, all the while tearing at their shirts and discussing the matter amongst themselves, claiming to be powerless to stop the events, even as they were happening.
There is evidence of yet another source for yet another "tip" regarding the Brothers to Rescue supposed "political action" -- Richard Nuccio's e-mail message to Sandy Berger stated simply that, "Reports by Miami police have raised suspicions that a Cuban-American group, Brothers to the Rescue, may be planning another in a series of violations of Cuban air space tomorrow." If that was the source, then the likely tipsters would have been other Cuban spies at work in Miami, including possible members of La Red Avispa.
U.S. authorities already knew that Roque had defected back to Cuba on February 23, but never notified the Brothers to the Rescue of that fact. Further, in light of the defection of Roque, they did not even reconsider the validity of the "tip" that he had provided about the Brothers' supposed upcoming political action, though to have accomplished that within the 24 hours between Roque's defection and the shootdown would have been nothing short of miraculous speed in Washington policy making terms.
Additional substantiation of advance knowledge within Washington circles came to light through the informal chatter and rumors around Washington's social and political elite in the days and weeks leading up to February 24, 1996. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, President Reagan's former Ambassador to the United Nations, had a conversation with a senior Clinton Administration official who told her "he was so concerned he had not been able to sleep at all." After the shootdown, Ambassador Kirkpatrick was quoted as commenting that the White House should have warned Brothers to the Rescue. She simply stated, "Non-notification is absolutely inexplicable."
The night before the shootdown during the intermission of a ballet, Richard Nuccio spoke to a reporter with the Miami Herald's Washington Bureau. Informally, he commented that he had an awful feeling that the Brothers were headed for a clash with Cuban authorities the next day. He did not go into detail as to why.
Assembling the pieces of the puzzle, it is now apparent that Ana Montes' role in setting up the briefings by Admiral Eugene Carroll only the day before the shootdown was part of a Cuban influence campaign. In the wake of Admiral Carroll's briefings, Washington was practically abuzz with news about Brothers to the Rescue and what was about to happen -- even if there was little to no time available to formulate a fully coordinated policy response and plan. This allowed the Cubans to reap the benefits afterwards from those who would unwittingly fall for the carefully placed information that there had been some sort of conspiracy on the part of the U.S. Government itself.
Still it wouldn't have taken much time or a great leap of imagination for just one of the many officials who had heard the news to simply pick up the phone and call the Brothers to the Rescue group. Alternatively, they could have had the FAA convey the message about the heightened risk.
Inaction does not mean that there was a conspiracy between Clinton and Castro, as some claim. The U.S. and Cuba had not sat down together and planned the shootdown and subsequent cover up -- but it was exactly that conclusion that some reached.
The reality was that the Cubans had carefully orchestrated an influence campaign to put blame on the U.S. for the downing of the planes.
Events after the shootdown unfolded rapidly, so rapidly in fact that the media couldn't keep up with or make sense of all of the developments. Once the planes were downed, Havana immediately embarked on disseminating additional false information on what had occurred -- and where. The morning after the shootdown, television in Havana broadcast the interview with the supposed "survivor," Juan Pablo Roque, from a plane crash that they stated happened just five to eight miles north of Cuba's coast.
Of course, Basulto was never informed by any source that his organization had been infiltrated by individuals working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or by individuals working for the Cuban DCI. Roque was both.
Despite the revelation of Roque's extraordinary status as an enemy agent, to this day, the FBI has remained tight-lipped about his case, his reports and their relationship with him. All the more astonishing is that the FBI, which has had every opportunity to aggressively go after Roque, has apparently failed to pursue the matter and, further, has apparently not made more than cursory attempts to invalidate the reporting that he provided.
To this day, many U.S. Government views regarding Brothers to the Rescue are based on Cuban disinformation planted from Juan Pablo Roque, La Red Avispa and Ana Belén Montes. Taken together, these agents of influence had worked diligently and effectively to corrupt virtually all of the conclusions and data about Cuba, Brothers to the Rescue and the direction of the Cuban Exile movement as a whole.
Cuba would continue its disinformation and influence campaign in the days and weeks after the shootdown -- and in fact continues to invest in that campaign even today. As Juan Pablo Roque made front page news in Miami, Cuba instantly escalated its propaganda campaign. It issued the following statement:
On February 24, 1996 between 3:21 p.m. and 3:28 p.m. two Cessna planes were shot down by our armed forces.
They were coming from the Opa-Locka airport in the state of Florida. The two Cessna planes were pirate planes.
As they flew, once again, in the Cuban airspace at a distance between 5 and 8 miles north of the Baracoa Beach west of the city of Havana.
Before this, between 10:15 a.m. and 11:27 a.m., three planes of the same kind had invaded Cuban airspace.
In this occasion, an airplane from our armed forces went to the place where these pirate planes were and with their presence impeded the violation of the Cuban airspace.
The pirate planes then took off to the north. At 3:21 p.m., while they were returning again to Cuba, one of these planes responsible for these incursions was warned by the center of control of air traffic of Havana that they had activated areas of airspace north of the capital and they were warned of the risks they were running by doing this.
In response the pilot of the pirate plane said it was clear he couldn't fly in that zone but he was going to do it anyway.
At 3:15 p.m. it is known through internal communications of one of the pilots that they were heading towards Havana.
Meanwhile, two of the planes were penetrating the restricted zone of Cuban airspace. The head of the group in a third plane remained outside of the 12 mile limit.
This provocation takes place precisely on the day our country is commemorating the 101st anniversary of the start of the war of independence of 1895 and when the people of the capital were preparing to celebrate carnival.
These violations have been produced numerous times despite repeated warnings that they would not be tolerated and that our patience has a limit.
As you will remember on the past July 13, 1995 and more recently the 9th and 13th of January 1996, there were incursions in our airspace by counterrevolutionary groups of Cubans living in the United States territory during which materials of subversive character were thrown.
Because of these recent events, each time bolder than the last and in particular the most recent, the Cuban government has again warned of the grave nature of these acts and the consequences that would be derived from them. In the public notice which appeared on the 15th of January in the newspaper, "The Workers," it was warned at the end "to the transgressors we can say that Cuba has the means necessary to guarantee the integrity of its national territory likewise to interrupt flights not authorized in our airspace for which violators better be ready to face the consequences."
In the same manner our authorities have informed the U.S. government on various occasions of these acts of violations that have been committed in a diplomatic note sent to the government of the U.S. on January 16, 1996. For the purpose of exhausting all resources that could avoid this from happening, the Cuban aeronautical authorities issued directives to the Federal Aviation Administration of the U.S. in order to inform them of the dangers that such flights caused by entering Cuban airspace without authorization.
In this context we also mentioned the repeated threats and actions that, in a particularly aggressive manner, the gangs of Cuban origin based in Miami have effected in recent times which include the aforementioned violation of Cuban air and water space, and even the gathering of weapons, the acquisition of ships, the introduction of arms and explosives and sending of terrorist commandos so they can carry out acts of violations in Cuba.
There has been no need to obtain some of the fundamental elements of this part of the story through secret means.
They have been narrated by their authors in press conferences in Miami, they appeared described in the newspapers of this Floridian city and they have been commented, including with alarm by high officials of the U.S. government.
These U.S. government officials, as stated in their declarations, have disapproved of the intentions and acts of these bands of terrorists that are based in Miami and have even warned them publicly on various occasions that if they continued these acts against Cuba the North American authorities would not be able to interfere with the actions the Cuban government would have to take to guarantee the sovereignty of Cuba.
Because of this, and after exhausting the recourse of warnings and adopting a very cautious manner in the face of repeated declarations and actions of an aggressive nature of these terrorist groups of Cuban origin that are based in Florida, the Cuban government decided to interrupt the continuation of air flights that transgress the Cuban sovereignty and put in danger the lives of Cuban citizens.
The responsibility for the actions that the Cuban government has now been forced to adopt in order to preserve its sacred and irrefutable duty to defend the national sovereignty falls on those who on repeated occasion refused to heed the warnings and persisted in their irresponsible adventures. The shooting down of these pirate planes should serve as a lesson to those who support and carry out such acts that have a tendency to increase the tensions between the United States and Cuba.
The Cuban Revolution will invariably continue adopting all means necessary in order to defend its sovereignty and preserve the security of its people. The Cuban government accepted the requests of the U.S. government to allow the U.S. coast guard to come into our jurisdictional waters and in conjunction with our border patrol carry out search and rescue in the place where the planes were downed. Our government laments that there was possible human fatalities as a result of the irresponsible and criminal aggressions against our country. The Cuban Ministry of Exterior Relations
The Cuban statement is notable in many respects. Replete with disinformation and propaganda, it also pointedly makes claim that all other peaceful means to stop the "pirate planes" have been exhausted to no avail, on both sides of the Straits of Florida. It also notes that the "North American authorities" would not be able to stop Cuba from taking action on its own to forcibly stop the flights, which it considered to be Cuba's right.
This initial Cuban statement appears to have been drafted to allow the U.S. to issue its own statement as part of some sort of coordinated response, which indicates that Fidel Castro may have felt that his earlier entreaties on the topic had gained traction in Washington. In effect, it would appear that Cuba left open a door for the U.S. based on its understanding that it had been given the "green light" for its operation, an understanding perhaps erroneously reached based on the silence of U.S. officials to Cuba's direct question earlier about how the U.S. would respond to the shootdown.
Perhaps the Cubans views were also further bolstered by the fact that the USAF had not attempted to intercept the pair of MiGs that had shot down the two planes -- nor even the second pair of MiGs that had chased Basulto across the ADIZ and nearly to Key West. That was unprecedented and the Cubans instead may well have read into that failure by the USAF to intercept their planes, or even launch a response, as confirmation of the "green light" given to the operation as a whole, though this is just reasonable speculation.
Thus, the Cubans may have been shocked to have received no supportive response from the Clinton Administration. Instead, it became apparent that the issue was being treated by the White House as a serious transgression. Any vestiges of softening the line on Cuban policy were washed away. A hard line response was in the offing. The Clinton Administration had been forced into a corner and, based on Cuba's own action; the hand extended in peace was being quickly and firmly withdrawn.
Simultaneously, the Administration and the U.S. Military were minimizing the news of how the USAF had failed to intercept the Cubans. Finally, while the opportunity to make a military response was planned and could have been enacted, the Clinton Administration undertook no military retaliation, even if options had been prepared for the bombing of Cuban military airfields, shooting down Cuban MiGs - or destroying them on the ground if they failed to take off -- or direct attacks on Cuba's leadership. The Clinton Administration response would prove to be essentially on diplomatic terms alone. More importantly, by the evening of February 25, the CYA effort in Washington was already in full swing.
In the days and weeks following the shootdown, Florida's state and Federal representatives watched with increasing apprehension the upwelling of emotion and disdain in the Cuban exile community in Miami. To help defuse the situation through channeling the emotional outpouring away from any violent acts and protest, they sponsored and organized several memorial services for the downed airmen, including a pair of aerial and ocean surface memorial events located right at the two locations where the shootdowns had occurred.
Thus, as a political gesture to the Cuban exile community and to help ensure that no further offensive action would be taken by the Cuban Air Force, President Clinton ordering the U.S. Coast Guard to escort any Cuban exile organization aircraft and boats to international waters near Cuba for a ceremony at sea. The Administration also issued a strict warning to Cuba to stay away. "In plain English, the United States of America will not tolerate unacceptable behavior by the Cuban government," White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry stated. McCurry said the President "believes this is a very appropriate way to commemorate the lives of four victims of this barbarous act by the Cuban regime."
The Administration also warned those participating in the memorials not to violate Cuban territorial waters or airspace. Clinton issued "orders making absolutely clear that the unauthorized entry by U.S. aircraft and vessels into Cuban territory is prohibited and that firm legal action will face those who violate this prohibition," McCurry said.
Any violators of that order would lose their planes or boats, face imprisonment or lose their certification to fly. The Cuban government, for its part, promised not to interfere as long as the participants at the ceremonies stayed out of Cuban territory.
In a clear statement of Cuban policy, Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, a Foreign Ministry official, stated threateningly, "As long as they stay in international waters, there will be no difficulty, but if they enter Cuban waters or airspace, Cuba has already said many times that it will use all measures to prevent it."
Ultimately, the U.S. Coast Guard sent a formidable flotilla into the Florida Straits. In all, eleven Coast Guard vessels were assigned to the task. Some were armed. Vessels ranged in size from the USCG's 110-foot seagoing patrol boats, with which the Brothers to the Rescue organization had often worked in previous years while undertaking rescue efforts at sea, to some of the larger 378-foot seagoing USCG Cutters. Together, they accompanied a memorial flotilla of about 30 to 40 vessels.
An unarmed Coast Guard C-130 airplane circled overhead to observe and document if anyone was threatened or harmed by the Cubans. Perhaps more importantly, since the Cubans had already signaled that they did not intend to interfere with the memorial efforts, the USCG aircraft were also there to help ensure that none of vessels purposefully or inadvertently entered Cuban waters.
Without incident, the flotilla, organized by the Democracia Movement, dropped floral wreaths onto the surface of the sea halfway between the spots where the two Brothers planes went down. The participants also dropped four crosses into the sea, each bearing the name of one of those killed.
A second Coast Guard C-130 flew with two Brothers planes to the site of the memorial. These planes were joined by six other aircraft -- two each from the Cuban American Pilots Association, the Rafters Rescue Legion and Pilotos Democracia.
The planes arrived at the site ahead of the flotilla and circled several times, dropping flowers before returning to Miami arriving in time to make a flyover during the scheduled memorial and prayer service simultaneously held at the Orange Bowl Stadium. The event was attended by an estimated 40,000 people.
Additionally, Miami's mayor issued an order that all city flags be flown at half-staff in a tribute to the Brothers pilots. The City Commissioners declared a day of mourning. In a longer lasting tribute to the fallen flyers, several streets in Miami and New York were renamed for them.
Nonetheless, these events, memorials and commemorations did little to create any lasting change to U.S.-Cuba policy, nor to wash away the discrepancies in the stories of what had happened that were coming out of both Washington and Cuba. Once public interest in the shootdown waned, U.S.-Cuban relations would return to the longstanding status quo, marked with distrust, sanctions and rhetoric. Any hopes in the near term by State Department and Clinton Administration doves to resolve the Cuban issue had been dashed.
Jose Basulto and the families of the four dead men would go to Washington, D.C., and ultimately to Federal Court in attempts to find the truth about what happened and also to press for some sort of retribution. While many questions about the events of February 24 were resolved, many were not. As some questions were answered, many new discrepancies also emerged. Sadly, to its last day in office and beyond, the Clinton Administration has remained tight-lipped on the facts, citing issues of national security.
In the days following the shootdown, two of South Florida's most influential elected officials made a special effort to find the truth -- Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Congressman Jose Diaz-Balart (both Cuban-Americans and Republicans). Ros-Lehtinen even received intelligence briefings on the matter. Naturally, the Congressional briefings were provided by the Cuban spy, DIA's senior Cuba briefer herself, Ana Belén Montes.
Years later, in yet another interesting development in the long trail of evidence that has emerged regarding the shootdown, a book about Ana Belén Montes was authored by Scott W. Carmichael, the agent who finally tracked and brought down Ana Belén Montes. Entitled, True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba's Master Spy, the book includes several notes regarding Montes' role in the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. Sadly, it also contains errors about the Brothers organization and mission, essentially repeating some of the disinformation that Montes and other Cuban spies had successfully planted about the group and its operations.
Nonetheless, during the promotion of his book, Carmichael was able to orchestrate a press conference by Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. While standing beside the parents of downed pilot Mario de la Peña, Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen called for a greater focus on Cuba's spying against the U.S. She pointed out that there were undoubtedly many more spies at work like Ana Belén Montes, who by that time had started serving her 25 year sentence in a Texas prison, without parole.
Chillingly, Ros-Lehtinen also recalled, "I remember after that terrible day in February, at an Intelligence Committee briefing in Washington, the person giving us all the information about Mario's death was Ana Belén Montes."
She went on to say that she and others in Congress were going to be briefed on the damage caused by Montes' spying in a future classified briefing. Finally, she noted dryly, "She (Montes) not only had access to the innermost U.S. government secrets, but she also created many of the assessments about what we know about Cuba."
The congresswoman missed the opportunity to add that Montes had also played a key role in undermining the Brothers to the Rescue organization itself, creating many of the false intelligence assessments about the group as well.
The implications of those assessments would ultimately pollute and undermine Basulto's own attempts in the years that followed to root out the truth. Instead of being seen as victims of a horrific act, many of Basulto's letters were received coldly. He was repeatedly stonewalled.
When finally the spy Montes was arrested, Basulto's letters and entreaties were never readdressed as what they were -- the letters of a concerned American citizen asking questions that deserved honest and open answers.
Elusive Truth
The smoke from the Seagull flight's downed aircraft had all but dissipated as the finger pointing began towards either side of the Florida Straits.
Within hours of the attack, Jose Basulto was asking questions of air traffic controllers, senators, and members of Congress. The families of the lost aviators were equally diligent in their search for the truth, yet it took months to get answers -- and the ones they received were not the ones they wanted to hear.
It was only through the fierce tenacity of the parties involved -- their search for the truth -- that brought one stark fact to light. The Brothers to the Rescue organization had been betrayed by both the U.S. and Cuban governments, and had been set-up by the dual agents, the Cuban spies who portrayed themselves as members of the search and rescue group.
From the outside, it appeared the Clinton Administration was doing everything possible to answer all of the questions posed to the multiple agencies involved in monitoring the events of that day. Yet the facts of what happened that day were concealed, obscured by the CYA effort and the misinformation emanating from D.C. - Disinformation Central -- and much of it was based on the reporting and hard data provided by Ana Montes.
As the years passed, newspaper articles appeared from time to time carrying new information. Piles of testimony and evidence from a litany of court cases surrounding the shootdown added more evidence and data. When combined with the ICAO Report and other formal reports containing new clues and information one can combine the data available, and unravel the years of CYA efforts, cover ups and lies to finally reveal the true facts about the Brothers fateful flight in February 1996.
Some of the most pejorative evidence from D.C. came in a response letter to Congressman Dan Burton from Brigadier General Howard G. DeWolf of the United States Air Force, dated September 5, 1996.
In his response to Congressman Burton's requests for information, General DeWolf stated, "Our review of the events has concluded that at no time was the sovereignty of the United States threatened and our personnel acted properly at all times." However, the hard evidence points to the obvious fallacy of the General's statements. Yet one should also recognize that it is likely that the General's response was reviewed by, if not composed in part or in whole by the DIA desk officer, Ana Belén Montes. Even so, the General must stand by his statements, appearing under his signature -- and no modification or retraction has ever been offered to clear the record of falsehoods.
By making such a statement, DeWolf indicates that the intent of the Cubans may have been known in advance of the flight -- the intent was to shoot down Jose Basulto -- and not to breach our sovereignty.
Further more, the Brigadier General states in his letter that, "Department of Defense radars do not routinely and systematically track civilian U.S. aircraft operating in international airspace."
That may be an accurate statement on any given day, but what is "routine" and was being done on February 24, 1996, are two entirely different things. We know the U.S. Government had literally illuminated the Florida Straits with radar facilities at DIACC, CARIBROC, NORAD, SEADS and Miami ARTCC tracking and monitoring the flights of three Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. This was evidenced by Major Jeffery Houlihan's testimony.
DeWolf's statements continue with him saying "neither party knew that the two slow moving aircraft were BTTR aircraft nor were they aware of the Cuban government's intentions."
DeWolf makes this incredulous declaration even though Houlihan testified that he called SEADS asking if they were watching the Brothers planes and the Senior Director Technician at Tyndall Air Force Base replied in the affirmative at the time of the incident. The fact that their flight plans were filed, opened and their flights carefully monitored by both sides is somehow overlooked.
DeWolf's most compromising paragraph in his letter to Congressman Burton is his attempt at blurring the boundaries of the ADIZ. DeWolf indicated that the outer boundary of Cuba's ADIZ is the southern boundary of the airspace claimed by the United States. Again, by Major Houlihan's testimony he clearly indicated that the U.S. government considers Cuba's ADIZ boundary to be the twelve mile limit to international waters -- not the Flight Information Region (FIR) line. In retrospect, DeWolf's attempts to describe the ADIZ limits were written in a manner that would only serve to confuse an individual, such as the Congressman, who would not have been familiar with the aviation acronyms and terminology. It is almost incomprehensible that the General would have been unfamiliar with the U.S. Government's policy regarding the location of the Cuban ADIZ.
One month later, a glimmer of hope in the search for the truth manifested when then Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC) charged that U.S. officials knew of the attack in advance.
In his detailed letter to then Secretary of Defense, William J. Perry, written on October 3, 1996, Helms stated, "There is substantial and growing evidence that U.S. military and civilian authorities were aware that three American planes belonging to "Brothers to the Rescue" were in danger before Cuban fighters shot two of them down in the Florida straits on February 24, 1996. U.S. officials watched on radar as Cuban MiGs headed toward the civilian aircraft, and in one instance, we know that a U.S. Customs official alerted Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. Nothing was done to prevent the tragedy or to alert the civilian pilots."
Helms mentioned that the tape recorded transcripts of the conversations between Cuban MiGs and the air control tower in Havana which were played at the NTSB hearing, "indicate that Cuban aircraft were at one point about 3 minutes off the U.S. coast -- and there was no U.S. reaction", and posed the question, "In this case, do you agree that Cuban fighter planes were allowed to fly too close to U.S. territory without a proper response from our government?"
Helms furthered his request for information by exposing this fact to Secretary Perry, "A House International Relations Subcommittee held a hearing on the shootdown last week and a U.S. Customs official with significant knowledge of the incident was prohibited from testifying in an open session; and the two DoD officials who testified could not or would not answer any questions. It seems strange to me that CIA officials were instructed to meet with Cuban intelligence officers immediately after the shootdown to show them 'U.S. intelligence data', but the American people have not been told the truth about this tragic event."
Of note, Senator Helms also included an attachment to his letter, outlining eleven key questions that he needed answered. His questions were specific and requested the details or transcripts of each event so to avoid any spin in the replies to his requests.
He requested information as to whether U.S. officials have the capability of contacting civilian aircraft such as "Brothers to the Rescue" while they are in flight. He asked if there had ever been other instances where Cuban military aircraft had intercepted the Brothers flights and why there had been no response, military or otherwise to Major Houlihan's phone call to Tyndall AFB.
In essence, Helms asked the same questions many others were asking. Notably, he did so pointedly in writing to the Secretary of Defense. While these questions have been answered over the twelve years since the date of the shootdown, no direct response to Senator Helms from the Defense Secretary has ever been located. It would appear that the Department of Defense simply chose not to respond and, in so doing, buried the Senator's request.
While Senator Helm's attempt to find the truth may have fallen on deaf ears, others in Washington continued to follow the established protocol and deflect the questions raised by Senators and Congress people who were acting in the best interest of their constituency and the American public.
There was also an exchange between Senator John McCain and then Lieutenant General Peter Pace. In his response to Senator McCain, Pace is quoted, "on 13 October 1996, the North American Aerospace Defense Command completed a formal investigation into the events surrounding the 24 February shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. I have enclosed the unclassified executive summary from the report that you can pass on to your constituent. The entire report is classified, it contains operational methods and activity."
In related documents, Pace's letter included a Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense from CINCNORAD. The memo, signed by USAF General Howell M. Estes III, Commander in Chief, relates to an Executive Summary of the shootdown completed by Brigadier General Rodney P. Kelly.
In his memo, Estes states, "Brigadier General Kelly has complied with his letter of appointment and fully developed the facts and circumstances surrounding this incident. I concur with his findings and conclusions."
Excerpts of General Kelly's summary, which is replete with obvious flaws and errors, appear below and imply either a general lack of knowledge of what occurred or an attempt to whitewash what really occurred. General Kelly's replies were explanatory; we've simply taken the most egregious of them for publication. In his report, he uses the term "BTTR" to refer to Brothers to the Rescue.
His version of what transpired commences with an outright falsehood: "The BTTR flight deviated from their filed flight plan and proceeded on a direct course south toward Havana."
As is a matter of record, there was never any deviation and the Brothers to the Rescue flight executed their flight plan exactly as filed. Thus, in making this statement, General Kelly's reply incorrectly implies a connection between flying south "toward Havana" and the MiGs being scrambled. We now know that the MiGs had been scrambled earlier that day and then again while the BTTR planes were approaching the search zone but still well north of the 24 parallel.
Kelly also implies that had "BTTR 1" not entered into Cuban airspace that day, the planes would not have been shot down. He wrote, "Shortly after BTTR penetrated Cuban territorial airspace, the MiGs engaged and shot down BTTR 2 AND BTTR 3 in international airspace." According to Major Houlihan's testimony and the screen prints he made, the MiGs were already hunting the BTTR aircraft before BTTR 1 accidentally drifted into Cuban airspace.
The General's summary continues further disputing that "these aircraft (the MiGs) never met SEADS scramble criteria; nor was there indication of hostile intent on the part of the MiGs until the first shoot down at 1521 EST." Again, a review of the flight data revealed surprising flaws in the General's report -- and of note, Major Houlihan made his emergency warning call to the Tyndall Air Force Base at 1516 EST, as documented in court testimony.
Maj. Houlihan also testified that there is a standard operating procedure (SOP) in which interceptor jets must be launched once Cuban MiGs cross the Cuban 12 mile territorial limit (ADIZ), yet this standard procedure was ignored on the afternoon of February 24, 1996.
Finally, the General concludes that, "The flight of MiGs were never a threat to US sovereign airspace." He also states that, "During this sequence of events, the Homestead F-15s were directed off battle stations due to a communications error at Cheyenne Mountain."
DeWolf's statement that the "MiGs were never a threat" is unfathomable considering his military background and knowing the MiGs flight and closure rate capabilities. The transcript of the conversation between pilots of the second set of MiGs and their ground controllers indicates that the MiGs pursued the last remaining Brothers to the Rescue aircraft to within at least 32 miles of Key West -- well within striking distance U.S. territory.
Lastly, the Department of Defense has never elaborated on the nature of the "communications error" between Cheyenne Mountain and the USAF. It remains an open question as to exactly why the U.S. interceptor jets were not ordered aloft.
The fact that General Kelly's responses were so far off the mark is, at best, confusing. Perhaps the data that backed up his report was again provided by the DIA, whose hidden Cuban mole played a role in drafting the response. Or more simply, perhaps the report itself was based on years of falsehoods built up by the DIA's Ana Montes. Or perhaps the General's responses were little more than a poor attempt at establishing the truth, based on an ill-informed official who had to rely on bad staff work. In any case, the report was obviously flawed when compared with the other hard data of what transpired that day -- and it has never been corrected.
Sadly, General Kelly's inadequate response was not the last of the smoke screens employed by those in D.C. In December of 1998, Jose Basulto beseeched Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart to uncover the truth of what had happened. To everyone's surprise, Ros-Lehtinen's and Diaz-Bilart's requests for information were summarily denied by Eleanor Hill, Inspector General at the Department of Defense with her declaration that "the two reports, classified Secret and containing Sensitive Compartmented Information... had been issued and had already been provided to the Congress and that no further data would be forthcoming." This statement alone raises the question of prior knowledge on the part of the U.S. administration to a higher level.
Havana's Daydreaming
Castro's plotters eagerly attempted to dispute virtually every aspect of the shootdown story. They concentrated their efforts at fabrication through the forum of the United Nations where, based on Cuba's once-acclaimed role as one of the leaders of the so-called, "Non-Aligned Movement," Cuba felt it had some goodwill and could garner greater traction in telling its version of events. Cuba's representative to the UN went so far as to perpetrate their claim as victims of the Brothers to the Rescue flights, even as the harsh conclusions of the official ICAO report were being published.
One act in their play was to introduce the regretful and penitent Cuban fighter pilot who'd shot down the two planes. "We greatly lament the loss of human life," intoned the subdued sounding Cuban Air Force Lieutenant Colonel named Lorenzo Alberto Perez Perez.
He attempted to soften his barbaric actions by formally stating he'd dipped his wings to warn the Brothers to the Rescue planes before following orders to destroy them. He admitted using the word "cojones," Spanish slang for testicles (balls) when he shot down the planes, but said he did so out of "excitement" in carrying out the mission. In no way was his expression meant to be "disrespectful for human life," he claimed.
Cuba's foreign minister Roberto Robaina also proposed that Cuba had the right to shoot down the civilian aircraft because, as he stated, neither Cuba nor the United States were signatories to a 1984 international aviation protocol which forbids the use of weapons against unarmed civilian aircraft.
Robaina also maintained Cuba's tough stance to the United Nation's telling them he had "all the conversations, all the maps," to prove Cuban airspace had been violated. When offered to review the U.S. Military's own data on the shootdown, subsequently Robaina retreated from his position. Cuba's delegation to the United Nations then claimed that they maintained no one technically competent to evaluate U.S. data. To ensure fair representation, the CIA and the State Department arranged to provide entry visas for six Cuban military intelligence officers. Once in New York, the Cubans were shown the same classified data that the United States was providing to the other United Nations delegations. Cuba's stance eased but their contention did not change.
Even in the days leading up to the release of the U.N. International Civil Aviation Organization's report, Cuba continued its bold rhetoric that the planes were shot down in Cuban airspace. Cuban Ambassador Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla said Cuba had "solid evidence" that he said was "ignored" and called the report "incomplete."
Ricardo Alarcón, president of Cuba's National Assembly, claimed the report was "stitched together the way a tailor manufactures a suit after the measurements are dictated to him." Alarcón claimed Cuba delivered the original pilot-to-tower audio tapes to the ICAO in March of 1996, yet the U.S. submitted only a transcript of its recordings in May.
He's also on record as denying that Cuba had delivered tampered tapes even though the U.S. transcripts contained additional conversations unheard on the Cuban version.
Alarcón further claimed the United States submitted no evidence that the civilian planes fell into international waters, even though the radar plots and even independent visual reports from the fishing boat and cruise ship clearly showed the exact locations of the shootdown.
As United Nations investigators unveiled the final report in Montreal, Alarcón halted the meeting and stormed out of the chamber in great theatrics. This would prove to be Cuba's only formal response and objection to the report. Ultimately, none of Cuba's requested modifications to the 94-page document would be heard or considered.
The ICAO report goes into painstaking detail in its findings and in doing so bolsters Jose Basulto's case that the shootdown occurred in international waters. The report highlights major facts such as Cuba's radar paths being recorded by hand and the difference in the radar tracts provided by each country. It also notes that the U.S. provided tracts were automatically recorded in real time.
The report also takes into consideration eyewitness reports from crews aboard the Majesty of the Seas and the fishing boat Tri-Liner. Those witnesses placed the fallen aircraft in international waters within four miles of the U.S. estimated location yet 20 miles from the Cuban estimate. Using the location of the Majesty of the Seas, ICAO concluded the two U.S. planes were shot down nine and ten miles beyond Cuba's 12-mile territorial limit.
Also taken into consideration were the huge disparities in the communications recordings provided by the Cuban military. The Cuban tapes were much shorter versions and blank at the point the U.S. tapes contain communication relating to the two vessels close to the downed Brothers aircraft.
The beginning statement of the report submitted by the International Civil Aviation Organization was damning and began with the resolution reaffirming "the Council's condemnation of the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight as being incompatible with elementary considerations of humanity and the rules of customary international law." This basically set the stage for the resolutions adopted by the Council of the ICAO.
In adopting the resolutions by the Council, the ICAO "strongly deplored the shootdown of these two civil aircraft," even agreeing "that every State has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory, and that the territory of a State shall be deemed to be the land areas and territorial waters adjacent thereto." However, the council deferred to the Convention on International Civil Aviation, stipulating that countries shall be "guided by the principles, rules, standards and recommended practices laid down in the Convention and its Annexes, including the rules relating to the interception of civil aircraft, and the principle, recognized under customary international law, concerning the non-use of weapons against such aircraft in flight." It also reaffirmed "the principle that States must refrain from the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight and that, when intercepting civil aircraft, the lives of persons on board and the safety of the aircraft must not be endangered."
One of the key paragraphs in the ICAO's conclusion mentioned, "the authorities in Cuba realized that control of the Brothers to the Rescue Organization was beyond the United States government; the Commander of the Anti-Aircraft Defense and the Air Force of Cuba was instructed that violations of Cuban territorial airspace should no longer be tolerated, and he was authorized, if such a situation arose again, to decide personally on military interception and shooting down, if so required."
While that last paragraph may indicate to some that the shootdown was premeditated by Cuba, two articles in the ICAO report nonetheless support the claims that the U.S. Government, military and civilian aviation authorities had prior knowledge on at least the before and day of the attacks.
The first article states that, "On 23 February 1996, the Department of State in the United States alerted FAA/AIA to the tense situation in Cuba and the possibility that the Brothers to the Rescue might attempt an unauthorized flight into Cuban airspace; FAA/AIA alerted FAA Headquarters, FSDO, FAA in Miami, and the military liaison officer at Miami ARTCC."
The second article reflects truth that the U.S. Government had in fact "illuminated the Florida Straits" to monitor the Brothers' final flight. "On 24 February 1996, the Department of State in the United States requested, through the FAA Operations Center in Washington, D.C., information on the departure of Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. In addition to FAA facilities, other agencies, including Customs, had been notified. According to the authorities in the United States, any incursions into Cuban territorial airspace were to be documented for compliance/enforcement purposes."
Second to the lashing Cuba received in the ICAO report is the ruling made by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Organization of American States (OAS). The OAS agreed in full with the investigations conducted by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in their factual description of the events and of the persons directly behind them. The OAS recognized the destruction of the two civilian aircraft in international airspace and the death of their four occupants at the hands of agents of the Cuban Air Force constituted flagrant violations of the right to life, stating "The fact that weapons of war and combat-trained pilots were used against unarmed civilians shows not only how disproportionate the use of force was, but also the intent to end the lives of those individuals. Moreover, the extracts from the radio communications between the MiG-29 pilots and the military control tower indicate that they acted from a superior position and showed malice and scorn toward the human dignity of the victims." The OAS report also formally charged the Cuban Government as internationally responsible for the deaths of the four pilots in the afternoon of 24 February 1996.
If the Phone Doesn't Ring, It's US
"I never expected U.S. planes to come save us, but at least I expected the decency of a phone call. A warning that MiGs had taken off would have been sufficient." Those are the words of Jose Basulto, and like most Americans, he never believed he would have been left unprotected by the United States military in the face of such clear Cuban aggression.
In the months that followed the shootdown, Richard Nuccio told a Miami Herald reporter that on the night before the shootdown neither he nor State Department officials knew that the FAA routinely passed the Brothers to the Rescue flight plans to Havana traffic control. Nuccio noted that he had consulted with Joseph Sullivan, chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, on issuing a stern warning to Cuba, but decided against it, thinking they would be calling attention to something the Cubans might otherwise not be focused upon.
Nuccio's statement was at best, made from his own lack of knowledge. The protocol to share the Brothers flight plans went back to the early days of the Brothers flights, almost four years prior to the shootdown. In July of 1991, Mary Ann Zduncyzk was an FAA flight service supervisor working at Tamiami Airport when she received a hostile teletype from the Cuban Air Force threatening "severe punishment" to Brothers aircraft working the rescue of seven rafters in international waters.
In trying to warn the flight group of the impending threat, Zduncyzk made a multitude of telephone calls. She was passed from the Pentagon, to the FAA in Atlanta and to the U.S. Coast Guard before finally contacting Basulto's wife at home, who was able to pass the message on by radio to the pilots in the air over the Straits of Florida.
With the lives of seven people in peril beneath him, the nearest Coast Guard ship several hours away and now aware that Cuban MiGs were likely circling above him, the Brothers pilot, Alberto Sanchez nonetheless chose to remain on the scene. He knew, as did all of those who flew the missions, that if you left the rafters unattended, it was a toss-up as to whether they could be found again later. In doing so, he made the courageous judgment that the threat to his own life was worth enduring if it would mean the lives of those on the water.
As he circled the raft, apprehensive of what might happen next, he suddenly heard a strange voice calling his plane's tail number over the radio -- "November 3033 Lima," came the call over the VHF radio. The voice identified itself as "Wove 1," leading a surprised Sanchez to ask the caller to identify himself. "Wove 1" replied that it was a flight of two U.S. fighter jets providing top cover for him. With the surprising arrival of the USAF, the Cuban MiGs had raced back to their airspace. Sanchez remained on scene until the U.S. Coast Guard arrived and rescued the rafters.
While that interception of the Brothers to the Rescue flight by Cuban fighter jets and other Cuban aircraft was not the only interception that would come in the years that followed. However, it was the first and one of the most notable, in that Sanchez had been provided "top cover" by the U.S. Military against an apparently overtly hostile Cuban air force.
Importantly, that first intercept of Cuban MiGs in 1991, led to the establishment of a protocol meant to prevent a future incident or possible mishap.
In a subsequent meeting attended by Jose Basulto and representatives from several U.S. agencies that included the CIA, FBI, FAA, Customs Service, Border Patrol and the U.S. Air Force, the following governmental recommendations and guidelines were suggested and agreed upon by the Brothers to the Rescue group in the wake of Sanchez's interception:
• Brothers to the Rescue would file an international flight plan on every flight one hour in advance of departure for each plane that would cross the 24 parallel. At the time no such flight plan was required unless the planes landed at a foreign port.
• The flight plan would include the pilot's name, mission purpose and area/time of operations. This information, although not legally required, would be routinely forwarded to Cuban authorities by the FAA.
• A unique transponder code would be assigned by the FAA identifying each of the Brothers aircraft on any monitoring radar, including Cuba's. Transponder codes were not required for daylight flights under visual flight rules (VFR), even on international flights; previously, transponder codes were normally issued to aircraft approaching U.S. airspace (i.e., in the case of the Brothers flights, potentially at the end of a mission), to assist in tracking their arrival and handling them in air traffic control.
• A radio call to Havana Center on the Cuban radio frequency would be made in advance by each individual aircraft crossing the 24 parallel to indicate their presence as filed under the activated U.S. flight plan.
Taken together, these procedures were designed to ease tensions with Cuba through full and open communications with all parties involved about the mission, including the full flight schedule and the details of planned operations. In fact, from that day forward very little about the group flight operations was not known and regularly tracked -- and the Cubans knew this very well. In fact, on February 24, 1996, the Cubans even used the flight plan filings and other information to ensure the success of their mission and to help track and ultimately shoot down the planes.
A second Brothers flight on December 19, 1992, was the subject of a memorandum written by another volunteer pilot, Raul Martinez. He was known within the group as "El Markador" for his one time rather poorly timed drop of a dye marker on a rafter's position. He too was on board one of the Brothers planes when they were ordered back to Key West.
That mission included flying over the Northern (Double Headed Shot Keys and Elbow Cay) and Western Cay Sal Bank (including Cay Sal Island) and four "lines" over the Straits of Florida, starting with a Westbound leg along the 23º125.0' N parallel from directly South of Cay Sal (080º24.5'W) all the way to North of Havana (082º30.0'W).
The mission began with three aircraft heading to the search area where they were to begin, planning to later be met by Jose Basulto who diverted his flight first to Key West to drop off a load of canvas shoes donated to the Hogar de Transito (Casa de Balseros) on Stock Island.
In his narrative, Martinez mentions the difficulty in establishing contact with Havana Center saying, "At approximately 24º40'N (i.e., around 08:50 Local Time) radio communication was established with Cubana flight 1978 on the 133.7 Havana Center frequency for a relay of our intentions report (i.e., to fly our S.A.R. Mission South of parallel 24 N, over international waters) to same. This time, a very infrequent occurrence, the Cubana pilot not only responded to our relay request, but courteously and diligently 'worked' (including frequency changes) through interference efforts provoked by 'others'."
Martinez continues, "Well after being established within our assigned Westbound 'line' (on 23º25'N and West of 081º30'W) and flying in less than ideal conditions (we had just penetrated the Western fringes of the 'frontal system' and there was some light rain and turbulence) we saw what appeared to be a raft approximately three miles South (left) of us. Our pilot was able to approach same, which turned out to be a trio fishing from a large circular inflated inner tube. There were no 'motions' nor any other signal evidencing a rescue request and, as we were reestablishing our Westbound line on 23º25'N., at approximately 09:50 Local Time, a very clear radio call was received by our aircraft. The message was concise and in plain English: 'SEAGULL FLIGHT (or BTTR, or similar reference) IMMEDIATELY HEAD TOWARDS KEY WEST INTERNATIONAL AND LAND THERE; THESE ARE COMPANY'S ORDERS'. When pilot 'Beto' Lares asked for 'authentication' of the 'company's orders', the strong voice (in a very 'Anglo' Spanish pronunciation) 'ratified' that 'THESE ARE ORDERS BY MR. BASULTO' and 'MUST BE FOLLOWED AT ONCE'. Needless to say, all three aircraft headed North and landed at EYW.
"Upon landing at EYW we did see Mr. Basulto, who was invited to visit the USCG compound and was briefed accordingly. While walking around the ramp we heard a couple of unofficial versions, ranging from announced 'military exercises' being conducted by Castro's 'Ejército de Occidente' (which supposedly included Mig flights) to allegations that our Cessna 310 had 'bordered' Cuban airspace and had been 'missile locked' by a Mig."
In spite of the real reason for the interruption of our mission, one fact appears to be clear, that in December 1992. the U. S. Government and its defense-related agencies, despite the "lame duck" status of the Administration then in charge, took timely and decisive action to remove Brothers to the Rescue aircraft out of harm's way.
From these incidents, it is clear that a precedent had been established where the U.S. Military had intercepted Cuban military jets or had passed along information to the Brothers to the Rescue pilots, even in the midst of flights. Therefore, it remains surprising to many in the group that no information was shared in the months and days leading up to the fateful final flight of February 24.
Trials and Tribulations
The years following the shootdown of Brothers to the Rescue were filled with scores of letters and requests passed between the families of the victims, the government, Jose Basulto and the Cuban cast of characters. These communications were further amplified by the testimony and data revealed in a series of legal trials that followed in the U.S. justice system.
As confirmed in the ICAO report, Cuba had clearly violated International Law and subsequently withdrew from any further hearings on the matter. That was further evidenced by Cuba's lack of response to requests from the Organization of American States (OAS).
Ultimately, Cuba was found liable in the U.S. Court, through the issuance of a ruling by District Judge James Lawrence King. In response to a filing by the families of those who had been killed, the judge ordered that Cuba should be held financially responsible for their actions.
The introduction to that ruling found that Cuba's air force and government had, in "an outrageous contempt for international law and basic human rights, having murdered four human beings in international airspace over the Florida Straits."
While nothing in the judgment indicated any prior knowledge on the U.S. side of the Florida Straits, the judgment does use the term "murdered" which up until the later convictions of five spies in 2001, had never been formally used.
Neither Cuba's Government nor the Cuban Air Force chose to defend the civil suit by asserting through a diplomatic note that the United States had no jurisdiction over Cuba or its political subdivisions. Therefore, a default judgment was entered against both Defendants in April of 1997 pursuant the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure [Rule (55a)].
Because the lawsuit was against a foreign state, however, the Court could not enter a judgment simply by default, and therefore the claimants were forced to establish that their "claim or right to relief by evidence" was satisfactory to the Court.
The families of Armando Alejandre, Carlos Costa and Mario de la Peña did just that. The family of Pablo Morales was exempt from pursuing its own claim due to the simple fact that he was not a citizen of the United States, even if he was in the United States legally. He had not been in the United States long enough yet to qualify for citizenship.
The Court found that the evidence and testimony presented had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that, "The Cuban Air Force never notified or warned the civilian planes, never attempted other methods of interception, and never gave them the opportunity to land. The MiGs first and only response was the intentional and malicious destruction of the Brothers to the Rescue planes and their four innocent occupants. Such behavior violated clearly established international norms requiring exhaustion of all measures before resorting to aggression against any aircraft and banning the use of force against civilian aircraft altogether."
What Judge King was referring to in his ruling was the Convention on International Civil Aviation, December 7, 1944, 61 Stat. 1180, 15 U.N.T.S. 295. That Convention cites the proscription on using force against civilian airplanes which attaches even if they penetrate foreign airspace.
Another example quoted in the ruling, Kay Hailbronner, Freedom of the Air and the Convention on the Law of the Sea, 7 Am. J. International L. 490, 514 (1983), states, "Even if an order to land is deliberately disregarded, a civil unarmed aircraft that intrudes into foreign airspace may not be fired upon."
In spite of such clearly established international accords, the Cubans still claim that they were justified in shooting down the two aircraft because the aircraft had penetrated Cuban airspace. They typically cite two occasions in which the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were claimed to have violated Cuban airspace, both in the weeks prior to the shootdown.
Yet those instances actually did not occur. In the first, in which Brothers to the Rescue leaflets had fluttered down over the streets of Havana, the Brothers planes had been outside of Cuban airspace when they made their drop. Jose Basulto himself has explained how he calculated the descent rate and horizontal travel of the leaflets prior to the actual drop date. He had originally tested the leaflets by dropping them from the bridge on Key Biscayne.
Thereafter, he calculated that if the leaflets were dropped into a 20-mph wind, they would flutter downward at a rate of 2.6 feet per second. What that meant was that leaflets dropped from an altitude of just 6,000 feet would land 13 miles away. Basulto maintains that this is how the Brothers were able to drop leaflets on Havana without entering Cuban airspace, which extends 12 miles from the Cuban coast. A simple review of the weather and the physics involved validates the claim -- and most importantly, if the group could avoid flying into Cuban airspace to accomplish the leaflet dropping mission, then it is also obvious that it would have done so.
With that said, dropping leaflets into a Communist country is a clearly provocative political act. Yet the response by the Cuban Government, in sending MiG jet fighters out to shoot down the "pirate planes" is clearly without justification and far from a balanced response.
In the weeks prior to the shootdown, the Cuban government's main contention is that the Brothers had flown multiple overflights and leaflet drops. Further, Juan Pablo Roque's false reports (authored by Cuban intelligence) to the FBI of planes loaded with explosives and of remote controlled helicopter attacks were all part of a smoke screen used to distort and hide the facts of what happened that day.
The judge's ruling also found that Cuba may have been testing the Clinton Administration's knowledge of international law regarding aviation by asking "what would happen if...."
Judge King rightfully quotes the international condemnation of the shootdown and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) which amends the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act to allow suits in U.S. Courts. The amendment "now provides that a foreign state shall not be immune from the U.S. jurisdiction of the U.S. courts in any case in which money damages are sought against a foreign state for personal injury or death that was caused by an act of torture, extrajudicial killing, aircraft sabotage, hostage taking...."
It is the term "extrajudicial killing" in the statute that allows the victims lawsuit to proceed in U.S. courts. Further, the events meet the definition of an act of state since the Cuban Air Force acted as an agent of the state and acted on behalf and subject to Cuba's control, as further evidenced in the transcripts of the Cuban pilots, who requested orders to shoot down the aircraft as well as in the zealous celebration from those officials after the planes were downed.
Finally the location of the shootdown is discussed in the judge's ruling. He notes that the events took place over international waters, which the judge finds to be based on "undisputed and competent evidence." Most compelling is the location of the shootdowns as they are referenced, finding the first plane, that of Carlos Costa to have been "18 miles from the Cuban coast" and the second plane, piloted by Mario de la Peña to have been "30.5 miles from the Cuban coast."
In order to support their claim for compensatory damages, the victim's families presented testimony of Dr. David Williams, an expert economist, who used widely-accepted methodology to calculate the values of lost wages, benefits and services to family.
The judgment also allowed for punitive damages under the Civil Liability Act and for the victim's families to be compensated for the extreme pain and suffering they endured, and no doubt continue to endure even to this day.
In all, after review of the record and with the Court being otherwise fully advised, the judgment entered on behalf of the victim's families against the Republic of Cuba and the Cuban Air Force in December of 1997, was $187,627,911. This was to be levied against any assets of Cuba and the Cuban Air Force wherever they existed.
Six months later, another legal trial would emerge and dominate the news in South Florida. The headline many had waited years to see, "Cuban Spies Convicted," was sprawled across the Broward County edition of the Miami Heralds' June 9, 2001, final edition. "Sweeping Espionage Verdicts Include Murder of Fliers" read the subhead.
The trial mentioned was actually the conviction of five of the original fourteen people arrested in September 1998 who had together served as members of the Cuban spy network, La Red Avispa. It was aptly called, "the largest Cuban spy ring known to have ever been dismantled in the United States."
Five others arrested in the case, including two married couples, pleaded guilty to lesser charges in exchange for their cooperation in the case while four others, including the former Brothers to the Rescue pilot and admitted Cuban spy, Juan Pablo Roque, who still remain at large and are believed to be living in Cuba.
The five spies found guilty on all counts were Gerardo Hernández, Ramon Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and René González.
The first, Gerardo Hernández, was the ringleader of La Red Avispa (the Wasp Network). He posed as Maunel Viramontes, a Puerto Rican cartoonist. Before arriving in Miami, Hernández served in Angola for the Cuban military and "distinguished himself in 54 combat missions and was awarded the [Cuban] Medal of Honor."
Hernández was sentenced to two life terms plus fifteen years for committing:
• Conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent and to defraud the United States
• Conspiracy to commit espionage
• Conspiracy to commit murder
• Passport fraud and fraudulent identification
• Acting as an unregistered foreign agent
• Aiding and abetting
The final charge specifically referred to assistance rendered to the works of René González, Antonio Guerrero, Juan Pablo Roque, Alejandro Alonso, Nilo Hernandez and Linda Hernandez. The latter three pleaded guilty to being foreign agents before trial. Hernández is quoted as saying at sentencing, "Ours may be one of the most ridiculous accusations of espionage in the history of this country."
Ramon Labañino, who acted as second in command, handled network operations when Hernández traveled. He directed other agents to infiltrate the Pentagon's Southern Command in West Miami-Dade County and oversaw an anti-politician mission where he targeted Florida "right-wingers of Cuban Origin" who could use their influence policy towards Cuba.
Labañino's dedication to Cuba is without question. Cuban media reports that he "distinguished himself even in primary school with responsibility supervising younger students." He graduated high school as an advanced student, before going on to graduate with honors as an economist from the University of Havana. For his part in the spy ring, Ramon Labañino earned a life sentence plus eighteen years for:
• Conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent and to defraud the United States
• Conspiracy to commit espionage
• Passport fraud and fraudulent identification
• Acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, Cuba
• Aiding and abetting
His last charge was for assistance given to Antonio Guerrero, Joseph Santos, and Amarylis Silvero Santos, one of the husband and wife teams who pleaded guilty to being foreign agents before trial. At his sentencing Labañino justified his actions by saying, "If preventing the deaths of innocent human beings... and preventing a senseless invasion of Cuba is the reason I am being sentenced today, then let that sentenced be welcomed."
Antonio Guerrero, the third of the convicted spies, was born in Miami in 1958. His Cuban parents returned to Cuba immediately after the initiation of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. A Soviet educated laborer, Guerrero infiltrated Key West's Boca Chica Naval Air Station where he was able to track building renovations, movements of military aircraft and other activities.
Guerrero, a poet and artist, has maintained his firm belief in the rightness of Cuba's communist cause, insisting from prison that, "My beloved brothers and I must be unjustly kept in prison, but there we shall not cease from defending the cause and the principles we have embraced." He was sentenced to life in prison plus ten years for:
• Conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent and to defraud the United States
• Conspiracy to commit espionage
• Acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, Cuba
The fourth convicted spy, Fernando González, was one of three full-time intelligence operatives who utilized false identification and life stories as cover while working in the United States. He posed as a desktop publisher while directing others to infiltrate the U.S. Southern Command. González, like Hernández also served in Angola as part of the internationalist Cuban brigade and was awarded the Medal of Bravery.
González has stated, "I simply want to reiterate that at no time did I endanger the national security of the United States, nor was this my intent or that of my comrades." He was sentenced to nineteen years for:
• Conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent and to defraud the United States
• Passport Fraud and fraudulent identification
• Acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, Cuba
• Aiding and abetting Antonio Guerrero
The last of the five convicted spies was René González. González was born in the U.S.A. in Chicago. In 1961, while many Cubans were escaping to South Florida, his family instead returned to Cuba voluntarily. González was also decorated for bravery for his service in Angola. After his experiences in Africa, he returned to Cuba and entered flight school graduating as a pilot and a flight instructor. González's work for the Cuban intelligence service targeted Brothers to the Rescue for sabotage and dissention, for which he would infiltrate the organization and fly as one of its volunteers. He also infiltrated Miami's grass roots organization the Democracy Movement.
González claims, "Our trial was converted into a propaganda campaign by the prosecutors, stirring up prejudices against Cuba among the jurors to achieve conviction." González is presently writing a book on the "irregularities and violations" that the five spies were "subjected to" during the trial while serving his 15 year prison sentence for:
• Conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent and to defraud the United States
• Acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, Cuba
The verdicts against the five men represented the first legal determination that the four Brothers were in fact murdered. The murder conspiracy charge was added after the original indictment and proved to be the most emotionally and politically charged accusation in the case.
As contained in the indictment, the charge read "the unlawful killing of human beings with malice and forethought," and while the term murder had been used from the day of the incident and in previous court records, the actual accusation of murder attached to an individual had never occurred in the five years before the spy trial.
In the first trial, the so-called "Cuban Five" were represented by public attorneys who acknowledged in court that their clients were in fact Cuban intelligence agents who were sent to South Florida to protect Cuba from an impending U.S. attack and from "extremist" Cuban exiles supposedly responsible for a series of hotel bombings in Havana.
The Cuban defendants were allowed to have sworn testimony of Cuban government witnesses, who were deemed credible enough to be questioned in Havana, and have their testimony included in the court record.
With the bulk of the trial focused on the actual Brothers shootdown, defense attorney Paul McKenna attempted to focus the blame on Jose Basulto's alleged "provocations" of repeated incursions of Cuban airspace, even though there were multiple trials previously held finding Cuba and the Cuban Air Force liable for the act.
When prosecutors presented the evidence of the shortwave radio transmissions between the spies and their Havana handlers in the days before the shootdown, McKenna claimed there was no real proof of their knowledge or involvement prior to the shootdown itself. He made this claim even though it had been previously proven that Havana had warned the Miami-based spies not to fly aboard the Brothers aircraft in that medium.
McKenna even argued that the shootdown occurred in Cuban airspace, despite the conclusions of the ICAO Report, which had been released in 1996, the civil lawsuit judgment in 1997 against Cuba (and the Cuban Air Force) and the OAS findings released in 1999, all of which state the events occurred over international waters.
Defendant Antonio Guerrero's attorney, Jack Blumenfeld, said after the trial, "I think there was just an overwhelming amount of evidence that the government had. I mean, for God's sake, they investigated this for years before arresting anybody."
After the guilty verdicts were handed down, Attorney McKenna called it "a very complicated case," and acknowledged the jurors verdict by saying, "....in our system when they speak, the buck stops there."
The decisions and verdicts regarding the shootdown of the Brother aircraft have never brought closure any closer for the victim's families, Jose Basulto, or the Cuban exile community. Many relatives of the victims still hold Jose Basulto responsible for the deaths of their loved ones. Conversely, the mother and sister of Pablo Morales, the once rescued rafter turned rescuer of rafters, remains loyal to the man whose group saved their son from the sea.
Others still want to see criminal indictments of Fidel Castro. For obvious reasons, those wishes have fallen on the deaf ears, both within the Clinton and subsequent Bush Administrations.
Within days of the guilty verdicts of their spies, the Cuban Government lashed out, calling the verdicts "revolting injustice" and further attacking the trial, the jurors, the legal officers and the American judicial system, calling it a sinister process. The Cuban Government referred to the convicted spies as "heroes with deep moral and patriotic convictions."
Further, the Cuban Government posted a letter, "a message to the American people," on the website of Granma, Cuba's Communist Party's official newspaper. The letter was supposedly written by the convicted spies from their prison cells after the verdict in Miami.
The defendants reportedly wrote, "We declare ourselves non-guilty and simply take comfort in the fact that we have honored our duty to our people and our homeland." The letter concluded with the statement, "The defendants in this trial are in no way repentant of what we have done to defend our country."
As the convicted spies are allowed regular visits from their attorneys and less frequent visits from friends and family it is possible that they may have authored the letter.
Attorney Jack Blumenfeld disavowed any knowledge of the letter or its author, reportedly first reading it online. He is quoted in a Miami Herald article saying, "But whether it's a real letter from them or not, it reflects what they have been saying for two years: 'we are just Cuban patriots, we weren't here to harm the United States, we wanted to expose the reality of the terrorism against our island which we believe comes from exile organizations in Miami.'"
A large portion of the spies' defense was based on "spying to protect Cuba." Such spying had included disseminating false information to U.S. agencies intent on creating unrealistic "situations."
An example of this practice includes the false information provided by Roque that Brothers was going to make a "political statement" on February 24, 1996, which was furnished to U.S. Government a week before the shootdown. That information was circulated amongst the FAA, Customs, SEADS and the Department of State.
These preparations orchestrated by the spies established the tracking information that was later necessary to avoid embarrassing the U.S. government and was later used in a March 2, 1996, meeting in New York that consisted of representatives from both sides of the Florida Straits. Some would go so far as to call the meeting "damage control" where the two governments contrived an explanation for the event which was foiled by Basulto's escape.
Whether intentionally or not, the Cuban government was told by U.S. authorities what happened that day.
The "message" posted on Granma to the American people is a predictable Cuban defense and was clearly written to appease the Cuban population. "Presumably that's in the job description for spies: they believe in what they do," a U.S. State Department official said.
Playing the System, the American Way
As the five spies of the "Cuban Five" were dispatched to separate federal penitentiaries in the U.S. to begin serving their sentences, appeals were filed on their behalf. Despite the rhetoric and open contempt of the legal process that had found them guilty, it appeared that Havana would employ that very judicial system to continue to fight their case -- even if the fight, as it would turn out, would be less about the legalities involved and more about the propaganda value of the case.
The main line of defense for the spy group had been that they were in the United States to "monitor the terrorists." Yet when public information provided freely on multiple leftist websites is compiled, a very different picture emerges.
Much of the Cuban Five's defense stems from claims that CIA had financed various anti-Cuba terrorist organizations that "have engaged in countless terrorist attacks against Cuba, and against anyone who calls for normal relations between the U.S. and Cuba." The Cuban Five defense goes on to state "more than 3,400 Cubans have died as a result of these terrorist attacks."
Cuba, the spies and the attorneys representing them make assertions that the Brothers to the Rescue organization was identified as a participant in these attacks, and according to one transcript, had planned to fly their planes packed with weapons and explosives over the island.
While the United States case against the spies involves over 15,000 pages in 800 documents, there is adequate information from these various leftist sources that lend great insight into the spies' mission, their lives, their supporters and the legal maneuvering both before, and after the trial, with www.freethefive.org appearing to be the most dedicated to the Cuban cause.
With the Federal trial being held in Miami, Florida, there were five defense motions for a change of venue out of that city, all of which were denied. The trial went forward with the convictions handed down June 8, 2001, and sentencing in December 2001.
Yet on August 9, 2005, the spies' convictions were overturned in a three judge panel of the 11 Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Georgia, and their case was sent back to the lower court, essentially offering the convicted spies a new trial. The extraordinarily lengthy 93-page court order cited strong anti-Castro sentiments amongst the exile community and prosecutorial misconduct as well as dozens of other issues that the appellate court felt warranted a new trial.
Among the issues cited was the saga of the rafter child, Elián González, whose then custody battle was raging between his Miami family and the child's father in Cuba. The order also mentioned that during his testimony Jose Basulto had allegedly accused one of the men's attorneys of being a Cuban government official. In addition, the order noted that Cuban exiles had staged protests during the trial and that some of the protesters had allegedly approached potential jury members.
A year later based on motions filed by the U.S. Government, an "en banc" hearing was granted. In legal terms, this type of hearing means that the full authority of the court is brought to bear on a matter, rather than an appellate review by only a small number of the judges sitting on the court. Thus, using a considerably sophisticated legal strategy, the appellate court ruling granting a new trial was overturned and the 11 Circuit Court agreed to hear the U.S. prosecutors' appeal before all 12 judges -- i.e., an "en banc" hearing.
Predictably, the Free the Five website calls the original three-judge panel's ruling an "unprecedented victory," yet calls the ruling overturning their appeal by the entire 11 Circuit Court an "outrage and travesty of justice." Meanwhile, the leftist organization has pressed ahead with a global effort soliciting donations and support for the five convicted spies so they may continue their appeals -- which is doubly beneficial for Cuba. First, the costs of the appeal process are covered by others; and second, a list of supporters and pro-Cuba activists is developed for future use and exploitation.
In May 2008, the last appeal filed by the Cuban Five was ruled to have no merit and the convictions stand.
Besides attorney Leonard Weinglass representing Antonio Guerrero, as of this publication (and to the best of our knowledge) the Cuban Five's defense team consists of four Miami attorneys, Paul A. McKenna, representing Gerardo Hernández, Philip R. Horowitz representing René González, and William M. Norris who is representing Luis Medina, also known as Ramon Labañino; and Kathleen M. Williams, a Federal Public Defender, for Orlando Campo also known as both Ruben Campa and as Fernando González.
The two men with aliases listed bring cause to disclose additional information found on www.freethefive.org website. These two members of the convicted spy ring are in jail under different names than those with which they were convicted, or at least, than those identified in newspaper reports.
Notably, the Cuban Five website includes a plea to the public to write to all the spies and offer support. In the confusing name game that follows and is typical in the world of spies, when you wish to write to Fernando González, you are directed to address the envelope to "Ruben Campa," however you are to address your warm wishes in your letter to "Fernando." Should you choose to write to "Ramon Labañino," you are instructed to address the envelope to "Luis Medina," but your cordiality to "Ramon."
As a reminder, both these men were charged with, found guilty of and sentenced for fraudulent identification and passport fraud -- making it no less than astonishing that on Free the Five website multiple names are recommended to be used when addressing them. Most probably, soon after the publication of this book, those sections of the website will be quickly changed or modified to include explanations for the multiple names.
According to the Free the Five website, on May 23, 2004, Leonard Weinglass was the keynote speaker at the 2004 Bay Area Cuba Conference. That event was chaired by Jeff Mackler of National Secretary of Socialist Action, a group who on their website describes themselves as "a group of revolutionary socialists committed to the emancipation of working and oppressed people everywhere!" The description goes on to include the following statement, "We are active in the labor, anti-war, human rights, student, women's, Black and Chicano liberation, queer and all other social movements that challenge the injustices of capitalism and organize people to stand up and fight in their own interests."
Socialist Action's website also says they are active in a variety of social movements that "seeks to inject a revolutionary Marxist perspective into these movements and protests."
Thus, despite having been rejected by virtually every nation of the former East Bloc, it would seem that the socialist political agenda remains alive and well, at least in the small outpost of the Socialist Action website.
Major excerpts from Weinglass' speech are published online. He speaks clearly about the actions and efforts of the Cuban Five. Weinglass' maintains that the spies came to the United States only after Cuba's Representative to the United Nations, Ricardo Alarcón, had protested alleged attacks against Cuba's tourism industry. These attacks, Alarcón had claimed, originated in the United States from South Florida. Alarcón requested a UN resolution condemning the United States for tolerating these acts. However, his request was tabled by the United Nations Security Council and "It was in that climate that the Cuban Five came forward," says Weinglass.
Weinglass calls the spies, "Five men who left their country and came to the United States, without weapons, without explosives, without a true support network to draw on in the United States. But they had wit, courage and intellect...."
According to Weinglass, the Cubans are said to have compiled a large dossier of information on activities in the South Florida Cuban exile community. That information supposedly alleged paramilitary operations being planned between the Cuban American National Foundation and persons who were either active military or ex-military personnel, including those who had connections with Nicaraguan Contras and would be paid commissions and have $100,000 life insurance policies for their U.S. families.
In June of 1998, twenty-eight months after the shootdown of Brothers to the Rescue, the Cubans invited a team of high-level members from the FBI to come to Cuba and receive that information the Cubans had compiled on criminal activity in the United States. The Cubans believed that these alleged acts, the act of training, the act of sending an armed force outside the United States to attack a third country, were a violation of the United States Neutrality Act. The Act forbids any American citizen to participate in any action that's going to result in a military action against a third party. The Cubans thought that if they shared the information that they had gathered and collected, the FBI would be forced to take steps to mitigate the perceived threat against Cuba.
Cuba handed the information to the FBI team, including over an hour and a half of video tapes, and the FBI returned to Washington never again contacting the Cubans nor making a single arrest.
Five or six months passed before the Cubans attempted another ploy, this time handing the same dossier to The New York Times, in hopes the paper would publish their material. The Cubans provided them the alleged names, places, dates, and supposed locations of events. The Cubans felt their tale was something the newspaper would easily confirm because the data they offered was so specific, but like the FBI, the New York Times had no interest in the allegations or the tapes and did not write a single article based on the information that was passed to them.
Weinglass is not the only one to take the case to the public -- indeed, the case of the Cuban Five, which Weinglass calls the longest running case in U.S. history, has been taken up by numerous organizations, mostly amongst the pro-Cuba left.
Among these, another is worth mentioning, www.cubasolidarity.net, which published an article entitled, "The Cuban Downing of the Planes -- An Attempt to Provide Context." On this site, the organization offers thirty-one pages of opinion and left-wing reporting, some useful, even if questionable, since it provides otherwise unpublished, censored or sanitized information.
While the current content of the site has changed, the material printed from the site on February 5, 2005, is quoted:
The Cuban government had made its intentions clear through official channels to the U.S. government: Saying (to paraphrase) "If you do not take the actions within your legal authority and responsibility to stop your citizens to from committing thee violations of Cuban airspace, we will shoot them down."
Later in the article, the website blogger (who was unnamed) continued by claiming, without supporting evidence that:
"...the U.S. had not only failed to respond, but has for years provided financing and countless organized attempts by organizations bent on physical violence against Cuba."
The Cuba Solidarity site had many short articles written from all over the globe that expressed opinion of both fact and fiction about the downing of the two aircraft. One story found amongst the rest was the transcript of the statements of Juan Pablo Roque from a Cuban television interview.
Identified in the thirty-one pages printed from Cuba Solidarity on February 5, 2005, as "Statements By Pilot of Brothers To The Rescue," with the subhead, "Following is the interview on Cuban Television of the Pilot from the Brothers to the Rescue, who is in Cuba." These quotes are from the NTW 8:00 p.m. News Edition on February 26, 1996, and this unofficial translation was produced by Merri Ansara on February 27, 1996.
While much of the transcript coincides with what was published in the U.S. media, there are some nuances to this which appeared on this Internet version. First, there is Roque's accusation of rafter's families prepaying the Brothers organization between two and four thousand dollars to "locate family members who had left the country (Cuba) in the Straits of Florida and provide the information to the U.S. Coast Guard."
Second, the transcript includes a section where Roque makes accusations that Brothers to the Rescue is a counterrevolutionary organization engaged in such activities as "planning to land and unload explosives to be placed around high tension towers that would be blown up to disrupt the national energy system."
Third, Roque also claims that Basulto gave him instructions on small shot anti-personnel weapons that would be brought into Cuba to make attacks on persons, "above all on the life of the Commander in Chief..." (Castro). He also makes claims that Basulto personally arranged for the purchase of a Czech manufactured model Delfin L-29 jet plane that was to be used for direct attacks on military bases and installations.
Roque said the funds for these alleged terrorist activities came from the "Cuban American National Foundation and Cuban-American businesses like Bacardi."
Roque also publicly identified the FBI agent to whom he had been reporting. Live on Cuban television, in what amounts to the ultimate slap in the face of the FBI and the U.S. Government, Roque states that he "personally informed FBI agent Oscar Montoto under the pseudonym of Slingman of all the operations carried out by Brothers to the Rescue violating Cuban air space. His beeper number is 734-5578."
The interview continued with Roque openly discussing supposed incursions of Cuban airspace and the leaflet drops. Incredibly, Roque claims that the leaflets were dropped from an altitude of 9,500 feet from a distance of less than 10 miles from the Cuban coast. In commenting on this, Roque inadvertently validates Basulto's own claim that he had dropped the leaflets from outside of Cuban airspace and that they had fluttered down, blowing southward in the wind over Havana. In essence, Roque's math is quite similar to Basulto's and even a casual reader will concur that if one were to go to the trouble of computing decent rates and the effect of winds in the first place, it would make no sense to fly two miles into Cuban airspace to make the drop. Instead, the only reason to have gone to the effort of computing descent rates and the like would be to have avoided having to fly over Havana itself and into Cuban airspace. In essence, based on Roque's own calculations, one would have simply dropped the leaflets from a higher altitude and remained outside the 12-mile limit.
Roque goes on to cite what he claims are violations of civil aeronautical regulations saying pilots and crew of Brothers flights threw smoke bombs from the windows of the planes, including times when they struck the propeller. Roque makes this last claim despite that a simple check with FAA regulations reveals that there are no such prohibitions against dropping items from aircraft -- just that adequate precautions must be taken to avoid endangering anyone on the ground below. Whatever mishaps may have happened during airdrops, no Brothers to the Rescue aircraft was lost or damaged as a result either, making the Roque's comment quite pointless, even if yet another example of carefully constructed rhetoric and disinformation.
Roque also brings up what he terms to be structural violations in the aircraft like the windows and doors being opened in flight, low altitude passes of less than 50' when provisions were thrown out, false reports of an aircraft's location during flights so as to trick Cuban air traffic controllers. Yet again, none of these practices are illegal or in violation of Federal Aviation Regulations, except potentially the claim that the aircraft were reporting false positions to the Cuban air traffic controllers -- yet this is a minor infraction at best. However, even there the claim is stretched since in actual practice, the Brothers to the Rescue pilots would hide the position not of their aircraft from air traffic controllers, but rather of the Cuban rafters that they had found so as to protect them from being attacked by the Cuban Coast Guard, which regularly sought to get to the rafts before the U.S. Coast Guard. On several occasions, the Cuban gunboats had won the race and the Brothers pilots had witnessed -- and even filmed -- the Cubans hunting and subsequently ramming a raft, and "rescuing" the rafters while brandishing their AK-47s. In one case, the Cuban gunboats had even threatened to fire upon a Brothers aircraft, aiming their AK-47s at the aircraft.
The online report from Cuba Solidarity also mentioned multiple photographs that were shown during the television interview, which reportedly included images such as Roque posing with Jose Basulto and with fellow spy René González, and another with Roque standing beside Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Also shown was a report from Channel 23 in Miami from July 23, 1995, where a journalist reported that he traveled in N2506 with Basulto and Roque. In that report, he commented that four Brothers planes were visible from the Malecon, flying in perfect formation. He indicated that shortly thereafter Cuba responded by launching a MiG-23 that flew near them for a period of about five minutes.
The last video shown in the Cuban television report was of Roque arriving in Havana on a Cubana flight the day before the shootdown.
What makes Roque's admissions in the Cuban television interview so relevant is that it places him with the others in position and infiltrated into the Brothers organization. It makes clear that they were working as a unit and conspiring with each other to affect the shootdown --and as such this only serves to further validate the U.S. Government's own prosecution of the Cuban Five.
Additionally, the evidence presented at trial and discussed openly by attorney Leonard Weinglass further notes that not only were the spies working together with prior knowledge of the shootdown but, the Cubans claim, so were high ranking U.S. officials.
Indictments of Faith
Too Little, Too Late
The final lawsuit came seven years after the MiG pilots had celebrated their successful attack with exuberant jubilation and shouts of "cojones." In 2003, in what some claim was timed to gain the support of South Florida's Cuban-American community for the upcoming 2004 election cycle, the Bush Administration indicted the two MiG fighter pilots as well as the General commanding the Cuban Air Force on charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, two counts of destruction of aircraft and four counts of murder.
Referring to the case, U.S. Attorney Marcos Daniel Jimenez was quoted as saying of the shootdown, "This was not a reaction to any perceived threat, this was an act of premeditated murder. This [the indictment] was a step to secure justice for the families of these victims."
Amplifying the point, FBI Special Agent Hector Pesquera also commented, "To think that the pilots were joyful when they killed four innocent human beings is unconscionable." Pesquera also called the attacks, "premeditated murder."
These statements by U.S. authorities came three years after Tampa, Florida attorney Ralph Fernandez, a former prosecutor with experience working with American intelligence, brought to light the story of Adel Regalado Ulloa, who had worked in Cuba's tourism industry and spent much of his time at Cuba's Jose Marti Airport. There, Ulloa had witnessed the Cuban Air Force in practice shootdown runs.
Fernandez is quoted in a Miami Herald newspaper article that was published on Sunday, January 4, 1998. He said of his client, "Regalado has a key to the vault, the information to unlock the door to establish that not only did Cuba assassinate those people, but they did so in a premeditated and evil fashion and somehow, somebody is manipulating this process to make sure that all this does not come out properly." Fernandez's statements were made in an effort to force U.S. prosecutors to take action.
Regalado's story was brought to light during a trial in which he and two others were acquitted of air piracy charges for having hijacked a Polish-made Wilga aircraft to escape from Cuba to the U.S.A. In less than an hour, a Florida jury had found them innocent. The trio had demanded that the pilot fly them from Playas del Este, Cuba, to Florida -- however, the plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico west of Naples, Florida.
Fernandez said in the article the plane the men hijacked was the same plane used for the practice attacks on Brothers to the Rescue. He noted that Regalado had told him the Cuban military used the Wilga to test the positioning of the MiG assault five or six days before the shootdown and further stated that Regalado claimed to have witnessed this personally. According to Regalado, the pilot whose plane they had commandeered and who had crashed the aircraft in the Gulf of Mexico was Adolfo Perez Pantoja -- and he was the very pilot who had flown that same plane for the Cuban Air Force's practice runs as they prepared to shoot down the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft.
For his part, the pilot, Pantoja, claimed that he had wanted no part in the trio's defection, but that he had been hijacked. He requested and was granted the opportunity to return to Cuba.
Regalado's claims regarding the use of the Wilga for practice runs are supported by the U.S.'s own radar sites which, as noted previously, had monitored those flights on the day prior to the shootdown. He also provided the identification numbers of the MiG-29UB that had been utilized for the attack -- it carries the identification number of 900 and is referred to in Cuban Air Force parlance as FAR-900. It is likely that the aircraft remains in active service with the Cuban Air Force, even if its sister plane, the MiG-29UB FAR-901 is today on display at the Museo Del Aire, Havana, its wings removed, perhaps to replace those aboard 900, given the shortage of spare parts that has grounded some of Cuba's MiG fighter force.
It has been reported that FAR-900 was at least for a time adorned with two stars painted on the nose section to celebrate the shootdown. Such kill markings are a common practice for fighter pilots and their planes, even if most such kills historically have referred to shooting down enemy combat aircraft.
In the indictment by U.S. Federal authorities, the two pilots of the two-seat MiG-29UB jet fighter that shot down the Brothers to the Rescue Cessnas were identified as being brothers. The pilot of the aircraft was El Teniente (LTC) Colonel Lorenzo Alberto Perez Perez. His copilot (or "Guy in Back" in USAF parlance) was El Teniente Colonel (LTC) Francisco Perez Perez. Together, the Perez Perez brothers acted as the triggermen while another Cuban Air Force pilot, El Teniente (LTC) Colonel Emilio Palacios, flew air cover for them in a second aircraft, a MiG-23UB which also retransmitted radio and radar signals from the Cuban ground controllers to them during the mission.
The Perez Perez brothers maintained a reputation in Cuban military circles as a pair of "real revolutionary diehards" with other Cuban pilots referring to them as little more than "thugs." This information was provided by another member of the Cuban Air Force who had defected to the United States, Orestes Lorenzo, who made the point in a personal conversation with Thomas Van Hare.
The final person named in the indictment was General Ruben Martinez Puente, who was the head of the Cuban Air Force at the time of the shootdown. According to sources, he personally ordered the shootdown on behalf of Fidel Castro.
Fidel Castro himself has named General Puente and cited him for his role in the shootdown in an exclusive interview with Reginald K. Brack, Jr., chairman of TIME, Inc., Joelle Attinger, TIME's chief of correspondents and Cathy Booth, the Miami Bureau Chief, during March 1996. At the time, Castro tried to explain and justify the shootdown to TIME Magazine. Six months later, in September 1996, Castro's answers did not change when he responded to similar questions from CBS newsman Dan Rather.
In the TIME interview, Castro maintained the position that Cuba was a victim of repeated attacks on the island by civilian aircraft, claiming his Air Force was harassed, the island's airspace was violated and that the Brothers to the Rescue organization was engaged in other constant acts of provocation. Castro maintained that the Cuban government "reported each and every violation to the United States in a diplomatic protest. We warned U.S. officials time and again."
Castro went on to claim that not only was his island being attacked by civilian aircraft but that the U.S. Human Interests Section was interfering with his country's internal affairs, claiming that they were paying the bills of dissidents, which he alleges was accomplished by U.S officials who were visiting the provinces and promoting opposition to his government under the pretext of checking on the welfare of rafters returned from the U.S.
Castro himself indicted General Puente as well as others when he answered the question of, "What was the chain of command?"
Castro replied, "We discussed it [the shootdown] with Raul [Castro's brother and head of the Air Defense Forces] and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We agreed that what happened on January 9 and 13 [leaflets dropped from outside Cuban territory] cannot happen again. We gave the order to the head of the air force."
Castro then claimed that the Brother's planes came twice on that Saturday when the shootdown had taken place. In making this claim, he was most likely either confused by or was trying to explain that the MiGs had earlier that morning been scouring the skies while the Brothers were still at their hanger at Opa Locka Airport.
"On the third pass, they [the MiGs] scrambled and did their job. They shot the planes down. They are professionals. They did what they believe is the right thing. These are people we trust, but I take responsibility for what happened," Castro stated.
When asked why the Brothers planes were not instead forced to land, Castro responded saying his air force had "lost aircraft trying to do the same with narco-traffickers." The dictator was also candid when he was asked about the will of the U.S. to prevent the flights saying, "there is some question whether the U.S. government attached importance to our warnings. They may have believed it was not so important."
Fidel Castro was not named in the indictment though the possibility of amending it at a later date was hinted at. However, that was then and still is very unlikely. Legal experts called the case "symbolic" due to the fact the defendants cannot be tried in absentia under Federal court rules and the likelihood of luring the pilots out of the country or of kidnapping them on Cuban soil to bring them to justice is far fetched.
Cuban exile leaders called the indictments a direct result of pressure place placed on the Bush White House by the Cuban American National Foundation, Republican state legislators and other local officials who felt Bush was losing the support in the community for his reelection campaign.
Richard Nuccio, President Clinton's former policy advisor and who, in 2003, was directing international programs at the Los Angeles based Center for Civic Education, called the indictments, "a fairly meaningless gesture that follows in a long string of meaningless gestures that help on domestic politics and don't do anything to either advance or undermine U.S.-Cuban relations."
Paul McKenna, attorney for convicted spy Gerardo Hernández, shrugged off the indictment calling it political "appeasement" and saying his client would never cooperate with U.S. prosecutors in a bid to reduce his own sentence.
As of 2003, McKenna had traveled to Cuba more than fifteen times and received unparalleled cooperation from the Cuban government in reconstructing the events of the murders, thus knowingly depending on the Cuban Government's own version of events of that day. McKenna noted, "I have sat with the highest members of the [Cuban] Air Force and military to discuss every aspect of how this happened."
"There never was a conspiracy to commit murder. Nobody knew [in advance] they were going to shoot down a plane. The government took a bunch of cryptic messages and played it to a Miami jury and got their conviction."
The Final Word
Unraveling the true story of what happened on February 24, 1996, is a difficult, confusing and challenging task. Without a doubt, through an extraordinarily extensive disinformation and influence campaign, Cuban intelligence has attempted to distort virtually everything related to the case -- including the content and conclusions of many official U.S. documents. Yet what is known and what can be confirmed are nothing short of incredible.
Four pilots are dead and their families still grieve. The families of Armando Alejandre, Jr., Carlos Costa, Mario de la Peña and Pablo Morales will forever feel their loss.
That they were killed on the order of Fidel Castro himself is not in doubt, nor are the names of those responsible for the act itself -- including the commander of the Cuban Air Force, General Ruben Martinez Puente, who personally gave the order to fire. The two pilots involved, El Teniente (LTC) Colonel Lorenzo Alberto Perez Perez and his brother and copilot, El Teniente Colonel (LTC) Francisco Perez Perez, murdered the four Brothers pilots. Cuban Air Force pilot, El Teniente (LTC) Colonel Emilio Palacios who flew air cover for them and, it is worth noting, excitedly also asked for permission to fire. Yet according to one witness, one additional pilot reportedly helped them prepare for their mission by flying a light aircraft to play the role of the Brothers to the Rescue planes for practice runs. His name is Adolfo Perez Pantoja -- and he has never been indicted for his role in helping to prepare and train the pilots for the shootdown.
No doubt, there are dozens of others within Cuba, as members of the Cuban Air Force fighter squadron, as personnel manning various radar sites along the coast, and as Cuban Air Traffic Controllers, who played a part in what the U.S. Government has categorically defined, in courtroom proceedings, as nothing less than murder. They each share the guilt, and perhaps many of them are still proud of their role.
Additionally, there are at least six Cuban spies involved who were on U.S. soil. Five have been tried and found guilty in court for criminal conspiracy in the murder of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots. Since their conviction, despite years of legal wrangling and appeals, they remain in jail, guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Their names are Antonio Guerrero, René González, Gerardo Hernández, Luis Medina (aka Ramón Labañino Salazar), and Orlando Campo (aka Ruben Campa and/or Fernando González). Together, they are known as the Cuban Five, and their ongoing incarceration is a matter of public spectacle and great propaganda value for Cuba's domestic scene.
Even as the new Obama Administration is to be sworn in, the Cuban Government has attempted to yet again recast the Cuban Five to new purposes. By offering to trade them for the release of political prisoners at home, Raul Castro, who was also personally involved in the murder, has established the release of these convicted criminals as a seemingly innocuous precondition to improving relations between Washington and Havana.
A seventh spy, Juan Pablo Roque, who was Cuba's key man in planning and undertaking the mission itself, remains a free man, living in Cuba. He left behind his "cover," a wife and a son in South Florida, who are daily cognizant of his ultimate betrayal to them as well.
An eighth spy was involved, one who could be called the "Queen of Spies," Ana Belén Montes, the DIA's and the U.S. intelligence community's top Cuba briefer. Her mission involved as much stealing of secrets as it did in inventing false ones. Over her decade and a half of involvement spying for Cuba, she not only provided a voluminous amount of highly classified military and political information to the Cubans, but as well personally maneuvered U.S. Government and U.S. Military policies to conclusions that had been, quite literally, dictated by Fidel Castro. It is not a far stretch of the imagination to realize that she was almost certainly instrumental in breaking down the relationship between the U.S. Government and the Brothers to the Rescue group, in redefining Cuban defectors as little more than "migrants" in line with those coming to the U.S.A. as illegal immigrants, to create and modify the U.S. response to the shootdown itself, to rewrite post shootdown studies, and to stifle dissent among other U.S. intelligence officers studying Cuban affairs.
She briefed everyone from top generals, to congressmen, and even to the White House on what had happened, ensuring that the data was slanted to favor Cuba's ongoing disinformation and influence campaigns. It is astonishing that just two years after the shootdown, Montes had even managed to convince many that Cuba was no longer a threat to the United States.
For Cuba, these spies are considered nothing less than national heroes. For the United States, they are little more than convicted conspirators who were directly responsible for the murder of four people, three of which were U.S. citizens and one a permanent U.S. resident.
Even so, the Cuban Air Force could not have succeeded that day if not for the unwitting silence of numerous U.S. officials -- all people who knew beforehand and simply failed in their responsibility to take any action to save lives. The list of those who knew is lengthy and only a key few have been covered in this book.
The names of those who were forewarned and failed to act include some very eminent personalities, such as Samuel (Sandy) Berger, then President Clinton's Deputy National Security Advisor and later unofficial advisor to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2007/2008 (who claims to have been too busy to read his e-mail or return several phone calls the day before); Governor Bill Richardson, who personally sat in the meetings with Fidel Castro where Castro had stated that "he wanted to do something about them". The list also includes Richardson's then partner in private diplomacy, Peter Bourne, who was previously the nation's first "drug czar"; Richard Nuccio, Clinton's Cuba policy advisor; two U.S. Navy Admirals and two U.S. Army Generals, specifically Eugene J. Carroll, Jr., Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (Retired), Ralph Weymouth, Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy, (Retired), Edward Atkeson, Major General, U.S. Army (Retired), and William Lanagan, Brigadier General, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired); as well as the former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay, Robert White; and Jack Mendelsohn, who had been Deputy Director of the Arms Control Association; as well as three journalists from PBS, Stephen S. Sapienza, an Investigative Journalist for America's Defense Monitor; Glenn Baker, a Writer/Producer with America's Defense Monitor, and Ira M. Shor, the Senior Producer of America's Defense Monitor.
All of these individuals either directly attended meetings with the Cubans or were subsequently notified of the nature of those discussions in which the Cubans had so frankly stated their intentions and had effectively requested, in diplomatic terms, for permission to shoot down the planes. Several of them were in a direct position to take action from within the U.S. Government to at least try to prevent the shootdown from occurring, yet, based on public records, seemingly did nothing except talk about it amongst themselves. For some, their response was horrifyingly bureaucratic -- such as that of Richard Nuccio, who may have even written, "We'd better have all of our ducks in a row, because people are going to get killed."
However, it is also critical to recognize that when dispatched to negotiate with a foreign government, diplomatic and military professionals are held to the highest standard -- and they carry their counterparts' messages back to the U.S. Government, not to the media or to private individuals. That they did not pick up the phone and call the Brothers to the Rescue organization, in hindsight, is both tragic and appalling -- yet it is also understandable in the context of the foreign policy and defense policy machine that exists in Washington.
The job of notifying Brothers to the Rescue of Cuba's aggressive intent ultimately fell upon the Clinton White House, which was briefed of the threat in detail. For most, to step outside of the policymaking apparatus and personally make a phone call to warn someone is not usually contemplated -- if you do, you take a serious risk of ending up either fired and possibly in violation of the law for transmitting classified data or findings or, if it all turns out okay and lives are saved, then you might end up a hero.
For Richard Nuccio, Clinton's top Cuba advisor, the options were limited. He was only fully briefed the day before the events, which was far too little time to have formulated a full, carefully considered policy within the White House. Yet he still took the time to discuss the matter with others and was clearly exasperated by the news. Also, there are some reports that indicated that the final word on the timing of the shootdown was considered "old news," and that the Administration had been expecting such an event for weeks, perhaps even months. Nuccio himself apparently also had other information from months earlier pointing to the Cuban's intent.
There were also numerous officials of the FAA who watched events unfold earlier in the morning and elected to remain silent when they picked up the phone to receive Carlos Costa's second flight plan filings.
Amazingly, even though no formal response was enacted by the morning of the shootdown, the U.S. Government took the information it had and literally lit up the skies over the Straits of Florida to watch -- and record -- the events of the day. Yet only one person took action to prevent the events they were to witness -- Major Jeffrey Houlihan -- and he was summarily told that they were handling it already. In watching the shootdown unfold, a whole range of government agencies and departments were engaged, including the DEA, Customs, the Pentagon, and the FAA.
All of these individuals and agencies were aware that something was afoot, and yet they did little or nothing to convey that to the Brothers to the Rescue organization itself.
There are those who claim (including Cuban intelligence) that therefore the United States is directly to blame for the events of that day, having first failed to prevent Brothers to the Rescue from flying its mission and second, having failed to prevent the murder. Yet that is obviously a flawed argument. Only Cuba and Fidel Castro can be legitimately held to blame, having pulled the trigger and murdered four men.
There are also those who believe that the Brothers to the Rescue group "got what it deserved." By overflying Cuba, even a few times, they argue that the leader of the Brothers organization, Jose Basulto, was playing with fire. Yet the Brothers group was essentially and undeniably a humanitarian organization. Together, over approximately six years, hundreds of pilots and observers had flown many thousands of search and rescue missions. Their record in the field of Search and Rescue is unparalleled.
On balance, in terms of human life, a tiny organization of about 100 pilots and volunteers traded four of its own and saved over 4,200 Cuban balseros from death at sea. If one is to count the assistance they provided during the massive rafter exodus of 1994 that number balloons to perhaps as many as 17,000.
The very few politically-oriented missions that the group flew were blown out of proportion by Fidel Castro's own misplaced paranoia, which is legendary. Moreover, it is also apparent that every life saved was another piece of testimony about the nature of the communist regime. Yet the pilots who were killed had little, if anything to do with those political actions -- they were experts in one mission and one mission alone, the humanitarian act of saving lives.
It is also worth noting that every one of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots knew and recognized the risk they faced. They were not blindly optimistic and many of them had been intercepted before by the Cuban Air Force -- some of them over a half dozen times. However, despite recognizing the unpredictability of Fidel Castro, they did not feel that it was likely that Cuba would take the final step and engage in cold-blooded murder. The numbers of lives saved was worth risking their lives.
Surprisingly, despite the shootdown, Brothers to the Rescue did not stop flying the mission. Up to 2001, the organization still flew periodically, right down to the 23-30 latitude line, in search of rafters. Yet one other thing had changes -- the types of pilots and flight crews willing to volunteer for the Brothers' mission had changed. Whereas in the 1990s, the pilot volunteers hailed from over 20 countries around the world, by 2000, most were Cuban exiles. They flew to prove that they had a right to fly, putting their lives on the line with every takeoff, and saving the lives of their countrymen.
The Cuban Air Force never again returned to the air to respond to the flights that followed over the five years since the shootdown. For its part, it was also clear that NORTHCOM had fixed its problems -- if the Cubans had launched, it was quite clear that the USAF and the U.S. Navy would have been on hand to make sure that they would not have had a chance to shoot down the other planes.
In September 2008, Brothers to the Rescue's last airplane, Basulto's Skymaster, N2506, the very plane that survived the events of the February shootdown, was finally sold. The proceeds were donated to charity, thus bringing to a close the humanitarian legacy of the organization.
Yet to this day, the outflow of Cuban refugees has not ceased. With great frequency, news reports are filed of harrowing escapes and of death upon the waves. Empty rafts once again wash up on the beaches of South Florida and are spotted at sea by pleasure boaters. The 2007 year brought over 3,000 rafters to U.S. shores. The need is still there -- and it is once again growing, making it a problem that the next President, Barack Obama, will have to address in 2009.
However, the days when small planes patrolled the skies off of the coast of the United States, searching for tiny rafts and saving lives are over. To fly again is risky and, since 2001, has not happened.
There are those who still claim that the U.S. and Cuba together conspired to undertake the shootdown and murder of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots. They claim that these events are the great Cuban conspiracy of the 1990s, similar to the conspiracies that resulted in the assassination of President Kennedy and a dozen other acts reputed to have been taken by the U.S. Government over the years.
Yet the truth is far simpler -- and far more complex at the same time. From a full study of the data, it is apparent that there was no conspiracy. Also, by the strictest legal definition of the term, there was no complicity on the part of those who knew and by their inaction did nothing to stop the shootdown from occurring. Instead, such inaction points more to incompetence -- which is simply unacceptable for individuals at such senior levels of government.
For the Brothers to the Rescue chairman, Jose Basulto, such an explanation is viewed as simply wrong. He still calls the Clinton Administration little more than "thugs" who helped orchestrate the murder of his friends and fellow pilots.
The events of that day also proved the fallibility of the U.S. air defense system -- just as the events of September 11 did again just five and a half years later. The U.S. air defense networks utterly failed to adequately respond and defend the nation and its citizens against what amounted to an act of war. The U.S. had been forewarned and had set the skies aglow with radar beams and placed its defense and security elements on the highest alert status. Yet somehow, even as the Cubans engaged and shot down the Brothers to the Rescue planes, no U.S. fighter jets took off to confront them. That this happened is all the more confusing in that the USAF had launched earlier that morning when the Cubans had first sent their MiGs aloft.
Finally, even after the USAF's F-15s had returned to battle stations and were idling at the end of the runway awaiting any order to scramble, they were still not ordered into action even as a pair of Cuban MiGs chased the last Brothers to the Rescue plane northward, far past the "trigger line" and almost to Key West itself.
The mistakes made that day by the air defense system seemingly multiplied as time went on. The loss of the two aircraft and four lives uncovered previously unrecognized flaws in the defense of the United States. Afterward the Pentagon did not duck its responsibility -- it made it a priority to fix those flaws for the future.
To sum up the failure of the U.S. Military to adequately respond that day is also the best way to best address those who will forever claim that there was a conspiracy that had been formed between the Clinton Administration and Fidel Castro. In that regard, it is perhaps best to recall a famous quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who wisely intoned, "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
For Cuba, the disinformation campaign surrounding the shootdown continues unabated. The Cubans have triumphed in their ongoing war of words with the United States and continue to do so, even to this day through their ongoing "defense" of the Cuban Five -- a defense which has less to do with legal argument than it does with propaganda and disinformation.
Yet even for Havana, the costs of the shootdown have been undeniably high. Their top spy, Ana Belén Montes, came first under suspicion because of her behavior in the measures that followed the shootdown. Her arrest and subsequent incarceration proved to be a great blow to Cuban intelligence. Additionally, the members of their spy ring, La Red Avispa, similarly became casualties of Castro's decision to shoot down the two Brothers to the Rescue planes. Together, all of these spies have years of jail time ahead of them.
Nonetheless, the Cuban disinformation and influence campaign grinds on. The latest maneuver is rumored in Miami to be of the impending legal filing by Cuba to extradite Jose Basulto for his alleged crimes against Cuba as head of Brothers to the Rescue and for his role and "responsibility" in the deaths of the four Brothers on February 24, 1996.
Similarly, there is no doubt that Cuban intelligence has gone back to work and remains undaunted in its mission to subvert and weaken the United States. Numerous agents are probably already positioned and at work throughout the United States, replacing those who were uncovered and captured. Even now, one must assume that they are gathering information, creating false reports, influencing public opinion and, ultimately, continuing to support Fidel Castro's myopic, paranoid focus and hatred for the United States and all it stands for. Their mission will only end when they are discovered and arrested or when Cuba finally leaves it communist/socialist path and joins the rest of the world in freedom.
Finally, the buck must also stop on the desk of the then President of the United States, Bill Clinton. His Administration's Cuba policies were at best confused and at worst hopelessly at crossed purposes. It seems as if his desire to sidle up to the Cuban exile community in South Florida was nearly equaled by his wish to improve relations with Fidel Castro. He was corralled by the pro-Cuba faction in the White House and simultaneously pressured by the anti-Castro advisors and fundraisers from the "Core Group," including Maria Victoria Arias, the Miami lawyer who was married to Hugh Rodham, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's brother. Rather than taking a stand, the Clinton White House instead vacillated between getting tough on Cuba and opening up a more positive relationship with Castro.
The Clinton's track record in the White House facing terrorism has been brought into repeated question over the years, including in the wake of the events of September 11. It is also critical to note that President Clinton presided over the two greatest changes in U.S.-Cuban policy of the last 45 years -- redefining the balseros as "migrants" and canceling the Cuban defectors' previous universal right to request political asylum and freedom in the United States if they survived the harrowing escape from Castro's communist state.
In what amounts to a victory for Fidel Castro, the Clinton Administration willingly created the present bizarre compromise policy of "wet foot, dry foot." Those rescued at sea are no longer allowed to apply for asylum but are returned to Cuba where they are at the mercy of the Castro Government, while those who set foot on dry land are allowed to stay. How their status as asylum seekers changes based on whether they escape all the way to dry land or are unlucky enough to be found and rescued at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard has never been fully explained. Nonetheless, even in the subsequent Bush Administration, there has been little interest in making any change to the Clinton's now long-established policy. Perhaps this is out of a fear that if the United States stands up and reopens the door to the Cuban balseros, many others will take to the waves, causing yet more deaths in the Straits of Florida.
More critically, in the days after the shootdown occurred, the Clinton Administration failed when it limited its response against Cuba to diplomatic channels. However, Clinton's subsequent maneuvering in the United Nations was brilliant, even if the long term impact of their efforts amounted to several resolutions which the Cubans (and the rest of the world) have simply ignored.
Despite the Pentagon's urgent planning process and the creation of a range of options for the President, no military retaliation was forthcoming. Certainly, the U.S. Military had the ability to respond, such as by destroying Cuba's aircraft or bombing the Cuban Air Force's major air bases in a retaliatory strike. Yet the long term impact of any military retaliation also would have been limited -- and it would have done little to bring about any substantive change within Cuba. Further, for the Clintons, a military response may have been seen as undercutting the effectiveness of the diplomatic response that they had elected to pursue. Thus, it would seem that for a variety of reasons, the political will to take military action was not there.
Today, there are no privately funded airplanes searching the waters of the Straits of Florida. In the end, the change in U.S. policy toward Cuban refugees did little to mollify Castro's hatred of the U.S.A. The belief that Cubans would no longer risk death at sea if they knew that they would be sent back to Havana has been proven false. The rafters still come, knowing that the odds are against them, more so today than ever in the past. They hope beyond hope that they will survive. Many don't make it. The sight of empty rafts, their tombstones on the sea, off the coastline of Florida again bears witness to their final dream of freedom.
In the years since the end of the Brothers to the Rescue mission, the number of Cubans taking to the seas in rafts has reached levels that are rivaling those of the early 1990s. In 2005, 2,952 Cuban balseros were intercepted at sea and sent back to Cuba. In 2006, the number was 2,293. And in 2007, by September 6, the number of rafters intercepted at sea had reached 2,340 -- thus, if the trend continues, the 2008 year final number will reach nearly 3,000. Many others have made it all the way to the Florida Keys or to the South Florida coastline. Yet thousands more have simply disappeared in failed attempts to make it to freedom.
No doubt the final chapter of this story has yet to be written. With every passing year, more evidence and information comes to light. Yet one thing is now undeniable:
In the end, Fidel Castro got away with murder.
Afterward
By Mayte Greco-Regan
As one of the original pilots, I was there flying the missions since the beginning of the search and rescue operations, even before the group was called or organized as the "Brothers to the Rescue."
The day of the shootdown, I was with a photographer and author from the Smithsonian Institute, National Air & Space Museum who wanted to fly the day's scheduled mission in order to get pictures for her new book, Women and Flight, by Carolyn Russo. The day's flight should have been just another search mission, like all the others we had flown over the years.
Just coincidently, that day we didn't fly. Someone else took the plane that we were photographing earlier and the Smithsonian photographer and I stayed on the ground and monitored the flight at the communications center in the Brothers hangar at Opa Locka Airport. Looking back at this now, it seems astonishing that it almost happened that a U.S. Government employee from the Smithsonian came just that close to getting shot down by the Cubans. I can only wonder what Washington would have done if that had been the case.
The morning of the flight, some of the boys got there early to get ready. Soon afterwards, Basulto and his crew followed. I said goodbye to my friends as they happily went about the usual business of preparing the airplanes, doing preflights and getting ready to fly a mission.
When they took off and headed east toward the ocean, it was the last time I would see any of them alive.
I still miss my friends, Pablito Morales, Mario de la Pena and Carlos Costa. I had never before met Armando Alejandre as it was his first mission with the group that day. Like the others, I am sure he was a wonderful person and had all the best intentions to contribute to our organization.
The thrill of going on these small airplanes in the hope of saving a life was exhilarating. It was no wonder that we had long a list of people wanting to fly with us. I believe Armando wanted to be part of this too and would have volunteered to fly many missions. I know he was out there doing something wonderful -- a humanitarian mission that made a difference.
I also believe the Armando was aware of the many dangers involved in what we did. Even though the missions were something we all did routinely, we recognized that the dangers were many -- not only weather, but also our small planes with no air conditioners, no toilet and continuous risk of having a major aircraft problem while flying low over the water, typically at least 70 miles off the U.S. coast.
We flew because we loved the mission and we loved to fly. We got no recompense except the everlasting memory of seeing the joy on a rafter's face when he knows he will be saved from the wrath of the ocean and given a new life. Least of all the danger was from the Cuban Air Force and its MiGs.
Some of the pilots had seen MiGs before, including myself. I once had a MiG fly so close to my plane that I could see the pilot's face. He waved at me, a friendly wave. Only after he flew away did it hit me that I should have taken his photo.
Anyone coming on board our airplanes knew the risks. We took extra care to explain the dangers involved, especially if someone flew with us for the first time.
Thus, I was very saddened at the end of the film, Shootdown, which was produced by the Alejandre Family and Maggie Khuly. They seem to feel a need to put blame of this tragedy, at least in part, on Jose Basulto and on our organization. Even if they say that the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of Castro and the MiGs, they take great pains to point another finger of blame toward of us.
This claim that the pilots and volunteers weren't properly told of the potential that they might be shot down is simply false. The claims of others that we were out to create a new war with Fidel Castro are completely invalid. It is a shame for a few to tarnish something that existed so beautifully among so many. For us, the mission was about saving lives -- and we were successful.
There's enough pain already for those of us who knew and flew with Carlos, Pablito and Mario -- and had only just met Armando. No one can ever understand the grief of what people go through when they lose someone they love until they have walked in their shoes.
In 1994, one of our pilots spotted a rafter who was only two or three days old, a baby in his mother's arms. In 1993, another pilot spotted a pregnant woman, nearly ready to give birth -- the baby was born in America. Hundreds of children aged 5 to 17 were spotted by us on the sea. Today, the youngest of those children are 13 or 14 years old. Others have grown to be in their 20s.
Had we not flown, their lives, like so many others, would have been lost in the Florida Straits.
As a mother, I look back upon each of those we saved another way of giving life. That's the real story of Brothers to the Rescue -- not the shootdown, the Cuban MiGs, or the deaths of Carlos, Pablito, Mario and Alejandre -- but the humanitarian mission and the thousands of lives we saved.
I pray for the souls of our martyrs and for their families so that they may all rest in peace.
Mayte Greco-Regan
Pilot
Afterward
By Jorge (Sonny) P. Dorrbecker
Former President, Cuban American Pilots Association
Cuba is the Pearl of the Antilles; the largest and second most populated island in the Caribbean just 90 miles South of Florida. The long established friendly ties with the U.S.A. during Cuba's first 57 years of independence changed after the Castro brothers' takeover of the island in 1959. Very quickly thereafter, by his actions and policies, Fidel Castro ensured that the relationship with the U.S.A. became strained and adversarial.
Separating Cuba and the United States is the Gulf Stream with its strong current that flows through the Straits. The Gulf Stream sweeps between Florida and Cuba, moving northeast from a few miles off the Cuban coast to just south of the Florida Keys before flowing up the eastern seaboard of the United States to Cape Hatteras, then curving east to cross the Atlantic Ocean to Europe.
Cuba's fishermen and small boat enthusiasts took care to avoid the potential of getting caught in the three knots strong current. Those who did were swept along the dangerous passage between Florida and the Cay Sal Bank in the Bahamas. If they were unable to reach the U.S. mainland, the boaters were carried into the Atlantic Ocean and oblivion. Weeks later, their dead bodies might wash up on the shores of Ireland, though most would simply disappear.
Despite the perils of such a crossing, record numbers of Cubans begin voting with their feet and their oars soon after the take over of 1959. Over the years, that exodus became what may be the largest per-capita migration in history. Those frustrated by the circumstances of Cuba were left with no other means to leave but to become rafters. With a false optimism of the danger ahead, they embraced the dangerous water passage to reach the US mainland and freedom.
By 1991, the slow trickle of rafter arrivals had reached hundreds, with many more disappearing at sea. Many individual pilots started flying sporadic weekend sorties from the Kendall-Tamiami Airport, southeast of Miami, searching for rafters in their single engine airplanes. After such unassuming beginnings, several organizations were created and by 1992, a gaggle of more sophisticated twin engine airplanes were flying -- not alone, but in pairs or even three or four airplanes on a mission. The flights went from weekends to scheduled operations.
The missions changed in other ways as well. With each passing month and year, as the pilots perfected their techniques and skills and training programs were introduced. New technologies were also brought on board: GPS receivers, long-range low frequency radios, airdrop equipment and later even data buoys to track currents and rafters after they had been found. By 1994, the aerial operations were backed up by base stations to handle communications and coordination. From the humble beginnings to the more sophisticated end, the main effort of the programs spanned a four-year period, from 1991 to 1994.
During that time, tens of thousands of Cuban rafters were spotted by a handful of flyers -- perhaps 150 volunteers in all. Week after week, the pilots and observers would spot tiny, flimsy rafts, often visible only from a mere mile away under the best of circumstances. Flying at 120 knots, a plane could fly right by a group of rafters and, if some of the sharp eyes on board didn't spot the group during the perhaps 60 seconds that the airplane was within that visual range, their hopes of rescue would be slim.
Those who flew the missions were universally inspired by the mission of saving lives. Persons that had the skills knowledge, equipment, wherewithal, opportunity and guts, disregarded their personal comfort for long hours, endured excessive cabin temperatures that often averaged around 120 degrees in the blinding sun, sitting for up to seven hours in uncomfortable seats, their ears covered with headphones to drone out the engine noise. We flew long, low altitude over water flights, knowledgeable of the risks, aware of nearby Cuban military maneuvers, potential Cuban fighter aircraft interception and the possibility of a catastrophic aircraft problem while flying 70+ miles offshore. They also took time from family and friends to fly.
The senior flying staff from the various organizations that flew knew each other well. I first met Thomas Van Hare in 1993 while orbiting above a raft I had spotted within sight of the Cuban shoreline -- about 13 miles offshore. We were flying in different search aircraft for different organizations. While I was reporting the raft to the U.S. Coast Guard, his plane happened to fly nearby and spotted the raft as well -- and only afterward spotted my aircraft. When I was running low on fuel, his airplane took over orbiting the raft until the Coast Guard arrived, making sure that they were okay and guiding the Cutter in to make the rescue.
We later flew missions together. Matt Lawrence flew in my aircraft as well and took some excellent videos and pictures of rafters and the crew.
Jose Basulto, funding innovator and the head of Brothers to the Rescue, was the primary Search and Rescue organizer. He and I were roommates as early as 1972.
Jorge Bringuier, who regularly flew up all the way from Puerto Rico to fly his Tamiami-based twin Piper Aztec airplane on missions, was welcomed into our confidence and briefed on the best search areas and flight procedures.
Dante Capas was an aircraft owner and Key West restaurateur who was guided overhead to his first raft very near his home turf. His Beechcraft Baron was always a welcome addition to the search effort and many of the pilots would visit his restaurant, the Two Friends, just off Duval Street for sandwiches when they weren't flying.
Manny Alen flew his Cessna 411 during long range missions. Using that larger aircraft, he also flew VIPs over the Florida Straits, including several top U.S. Government officials, such as Congressman Robert Torricelli.
I also knew the volunteers who were shot down on that fateful day -- February 24, 1996.
Armando Alejandre may have been a first time volunteer with Brothers to the Rescue that day, but he was a regular at the Democracy meetings that we all attended. So were Carlos Costa and Mario de la Peña. Pablo Morales was present at various reunions.
Most of us flew together during The Democracia Movement Demonstration Flotillas close to Havana.
I particularly remember one of those Democracia flights from July 13, 1995. Three Brothers to the Rescue airplanes broke formation over the lead flotilla boat, surprised everyone and diverted to overfly Havana. Covering the 12 miles to the famed Malecon that is Havana's seawall, took just a few minutes. Making a pass overhead, they dropped small flyers imprinted with some paragraphs from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Nobody knew what possible consequences this and other acts of defiance would later bring. The embarrassment caused the Cuban Government was never forgiven; for Fidel Castro, such a personal affront meant that the harshest reprisal had to be made -- and the later downing of two of the search planes, both civilian U.S. registered aircraft while flying over international waters, resulted in the murder of three U.S. citizens and one U.S. permanent resident. It shocked us all.
It was inconceivable that our small, unarmed aircraft would have been deliberately targeted and attacked by Cuban Air Force MiGs in an action that many considered to be essentially an act of war against the United States itself.
Jose Basulto, the head of Brothers to the Rescue, had always believed and had openly stated that the use of force by the Cuban military -- whether it was in a deployment to Angola, the arrival of Cuban "engineers" in Grenada, or the shooting down of our airplanes -- was a political consideration, not a military one. Therefore, Basulto had no regard when flying close to Cuban gunboats, even when crewmembers flaunted their weapons at the planes -- whether the deck guns or their AK-47 assault rifles.
He was right.
The shootdown of the two Brothers to the Rescue planes was a political act, authorized at the highest levels of the Cuban Government -- actually by Fidel Castro himself. The story of how all this came about is contained in this book's narrative.
From my perspective as one of the pilots who flew those missions, Thomas and Matt embraced a cause they were not born into. They have accomplished a superb piece of work both for their lifesaving efforts with rafters and for bringing this secretive story to light.
All free Cubans owe a debt of gratitude to them.
I can only add my humble thanks and restate the offer I made to them some time ago -- a "Mojito" in a soon to be free Havana.
Key References and Bibliography
Key References for Chapter 1
Clear and Present Danger, John Dorschner, Tropic Magazine February 16, 1997
Monk Magazine, November 1998, by Michael Lane - http://www.monk.com/display.php?p=people&id=3
Personal Interview with Jose Basulto, by Thomas Van Hare, November 6, 2007
Personal Interview with Jose Basulto, by Thomas Van Hare, December 7, 2007
Key References for Chapter 2
Tracking the Brothers Flights, Juan O. Tamayo, The Miami Herald June 27, 1996
Clear and Present Danger, John Dorschner, Tropic Magazine February 16, 1997
Transcript of Radio Communications as Recorded on Board N2506
International Civil Aviation Organization Report, Exhibit D
Operations Manual, Freedom Flight International
Bello-Puente, Regalado and Reyes-Ramirez Appellate Response Brief,http://www.hermanos.org/Doss-Tab%20B.htm
American Victims of Castro's State Sponsored Terrorism, http://www.shootdownvictims.org/documents/responsibleParties.pdf
USCG Message Traffic from MARINCEN MIAMI FL,0 252000Z FEB 96 ZUI ASN-D07056000301
Personal Interview with Jose Basulto, by Thomas Van Hare, December 7, 2007
Key References for Chapter 3
Excerpts of Testimony: Major Jeffery Houlihan, June 27, 1996
Transcript of Proceeding Before the United States NTSB
Clear and Present Danger, John Dorschner, Tropic Magazine February 16, 1997
International Civil Aviation Organization Report, Exhibit D
Operations Manual, Freedom Flight International
Personal Interview with Jose Basulto, by Thomas Van Hare, December 7, 2007
Key References for Chapter 4
Clear and Present Danger, John Dorschner, Tropic Magazine, February 16, 1997
A South Florida Spy Tale, Sun Sentinel, September 16, 1998
Cuban Spies Linked to Shootdown, The Herald, May 8, 1999
Key References for Chapter 5
A South Florida Spy Tale, Sun Sentinel, September 16, 1998
Cuban Spies Linked to Shootdown, The Herald, May 8, 1999
Shadowing of Cubans A Classic Spy Tale, The Miami Herald, August 16, 1999
Castro's Moles Dig Deep, Not Just Into Exiles, Tom Weiner, N.Y. Times, March 1, 1996
Florida couple heading to jail in Cuban spy case, The Miami Herald, February 28, 2007
Under in Castro's Service: The undertold story..., John J. Miller, National Review, November 5, 2001
True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba's Master Spy, by Scott W. Carmichael
Key References for Chapter 6
Area Cubans Relieved By Charges In Spy Case, by Sylvia Moreno, The Washington Post, September 23, 2001
Security like Swiss cheese, The Washington Times, October 6, 2001
How a Cuban Spy Sowed Confusion in the Pentagon, by Mary Anastasia O'Grady, Editor, Wall Street Journal, November 2, 2002
Top U.S. analyst admits to spying for Cuba, Plea deal gives her 25 years in jail, by Tim Johnson, The Miami Herald, Mar. 20, 2002
Cuban praises jailed spy, by Anita Snow, Associated Press, from The Miami Herald, Oct. 19, 2002
"Shoot Down" -- a movie directed by Cristina Khuly Eger, Rogues Harbor Studio 2008
Statement by Ana Belén Montes, who received 25-year sentence for spying for Cuba, Herald Staff Report, The Miami Herald, Oct. 16, 2002
Spy for Cuba says U.S. policy toward Cuba `cruel and unfair', by Tim Johnson, The Miami Herald, Oct. 16, 2002
U.S. intelligence analyst charged with spying for Cuba, by Tim Johnson, The Miami Herald, September 22, 2001
U.S. Analyst Admits Spying for Cuba for Ideological Reasons, by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, from The New York Times, March 19, 2002
FBI charges analyst with spying for Cuba, by Jerry Seper, The Washington Times, September 22, 2001
Defense Analyst Signs Up Veteran Espionage Lawyers, Team Represented Hanssen and Ames, by Bill Miller, Washington Post Staff Writer, The Washington Post, Friday, October 5, 2001; Page B02
Defense Analyst Accused of Spying for Cuba, Woman Passed Classified Information on Military Exercises, FBI Says, by Bill Miller and Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writers, The Washington Post, Saturday, September 22, 2001; Page A01
Cuban spy passed polygraph at least once, by Tim Johnson, The Miami Herald, March 28, 2002
Cuba spy suspect was rising into senior intelligence ranks, by Tim Johnson, The Miami Herald, September 29, 2001
Attacks Expedited Arrest in Espionage Case, U.S. Feared Passing Of Response Plans, by Walter Pincus and Bill Miller, Washington Post Staff Writers, The Washington Post, Friday, September 28, 2001; Page B03
An Improbable Spy? Friends Old and New Stunned by Arrest Of Reserved, Frugal Defense Analyst, by Sylvia Moreno, Washington Post Staff Writer, The Washington Post, Thursday, October 4, 2001; Page A01
Accused spy for Cuba may cut plea deal, by Tim Johnson, The Miami Herald, March 15, 2002
Federal Bureau of Prisons, Inmate Locator System, http://www.bop.gov/iloc2/LocateInmate.jsp
True Believer: Inside the Investigation and Capture of Ana Montes, Cuba's Master Spy, by Scott W. Carmichael
Key References for Chapter 7
Advisor warned White House attack possible, by Carol Rosenberg, Miami Herald
Clinton's Cuban Road to Florida, Time Magazine, October 28, 1996
CNN News Transcript #47-22, 9:25am, February 25, 1996
"Shoot Down" -- a movie directed by Cristina Khuly Eger, Rogues Harbor Studio 2008
Backfire, by Carl Nagen, The New Yorker, January 26, 1998
Key References for Chapter 8
Castro's Endgame, The National Review, May 6, 1996
United States Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review Board of Immigration Appeals, Falls Church, Virginia, Ralph E. Fernandez, Esquire, Fernandez & Diaz, P.A.
Letter to Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen from Inspector General Eleanor Hill, DoD, Arlington, VA. 12/28/1998
"Lawmakers: There are Spies Amongst Us", by Aldo Nahed, MiamiHerald.com, 03/07/2007, http://www.miamiherald.com/416/story/52824.html
Key References for Chapter 9
Letter to Congressman Dan Burton from Howard G. DeWolf, Brig. Gen.
Director, Inter-American Region
Author resourced public records
Key References for Chapter 10
Washington Post Service Report
The Miami Herald
International Civil Aviation Organization Report
Organization of American States Report 86/99
CBS News Interview Transcript Dan Rather/Fidel Castro
Key References for Chapter 11
A South Florida Spy Tale, Sun Sentinel, September 16, 1998
Cuban Spies Linked to Shootdown, The Herald, May 8, 1999
Key References for Chapter 12
Final Judgment ....vs. The Republic of Cuba, the Cuban Air Force Nos. 96-10127-CIV, 96-10128-CIV
U.S. District Court S.D. Florida, December 17, 1997 996F. Supp.1239
Cuban Spies Convicted, The Herald, June 9, 2001
Cuba Attacks Trial of Spies in "message" to Americans, The Herald, June 21, 2001
ICAO Report dated June 1996
Testimony of Major Jeffrey Houlihan Tab D, Issue II
www.thecubanfive.org
Key References for Chapter 13
www.thecubanfive.org
Socialist Action News and Viewshttp://www.geocities.com/mnsocialist/cuba2.html
5 Cubans get new trials after Miami spying convictions overturned, Sun-Sentinel, Aug. 9, 2005
Key References for Chapter 14
The Miami Herald, Sunday, January 4, 1998
Time Magazine, March 11, 1996, Volume 147, No. 11
Federal Bureau of Investigation Miami Field Office Press Release
U.S. Indicts Cuban Pilots, The Herald Broward Final Edition, August 22, 2003
Key References for Chapter 15
Migrants intercepted at sea surpasses '06, by Alfonso Chardy, Cuban American National Foundation, Sep 6, 2007http://canf1.org/artman/publish/home\_page/Migrants\_intercepted\_at\_sea\_surpasses\_06.shtml
Personal Interview with Jose Basulto, by Thomas Van Hare, November 6, 2007
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Matt Lawrence is president of Paratus International, LLC; a consulting firm providing disaster preparedness and continuity of business planning for the public and private sectors.
A Florida native, Matt first witnessed the plight of Cuban refugees as a child in the early 1960s. Lawrence later had the privilege of flying with both Brothers to the Rescue and a similar group, Freedom Flight International where he served as both Director of Special Projects and Chief Mission Specialist. His first mission as a search and rescue crew member was flown seated next to Carlos Costa, one of the four Brothers pilots lost in the shootdown.
Thomas Van Hare is former Chairman of Freedom Flight International and was previously operations director, mission director and command pilot for Brothers to the Rescue. As a Command Pilot, he went by the call sign, "Seagull Tango." Over the years, he has served with three Administrations in Washington. During the Reagan years, he was with the United States Agency for International Development. Subsequently, during the Administration of George H.W. Bush (Bush 41), he served as Special Assistant to then Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage and later to then Assistant Secretaries Dr. Harry Rowen and Ambassador James Lilly. Subsequently, he was in private industry as president and general manager of several marketing communications firms, including Capstone Studio, Clear Winter and Digital Minute. In 2004, he was asked to return to the Office of the Secretary of Defense to work with the Coalition Provisional Authority. Thereafter, he served as Director, Organizational Assessment, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Today, he is executive director of a company involved in the development and direct commercial sales overseas of sophisticated military aircraft.
Other works by Matt Lawrence
Dying to Get Here: A Story of Coming to America is a fictionalized story of one Cuban family's quest for freedom based on the experiences of those who have lived to tell of the treacherous crossings of the Florida Straits. They come for the freedom most Americans take for granted! ISBN-10: 059532410X
What To Do 'til The Cavalry Comes: A Family Guide to Preparedness in 21st Century America is based on Matt Lawrence's and Thomas Van Hare's professional mission planning experience and is a realistic preparedness guide for families wanting to plan for the natural disasters or man-made threats of today. Complete with product suggestions and itemized checklists. When you live prepared, you're prepared to live! ISBN-10: 0595391192

