“The Skinny on Cuban Intelligence” – with Counterintelligence expert Ean Forsythe

Andrew Hammond: Welcome to "SpyCast", the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Dr. Andrew Hammond, the museum's historian and curator. Each week we explore some aspect of the past, present or future of intelligence and espionage. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five-star review. It really helps other listeners find us. Coming up next on "SpyCast".

Ean Forsythe: Cuba, and I think you've already alluded to that with some of those Jim Olsen quotes, is relentless. They're aggressive and they're bold and they take the initiative to us.

Andrew Hammond: Well, thanks for coming to speak to me today. And I'm really looking forward to discussing all things Cuban intelligence with you.

Ean Forsythe: Thank you, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

Andrew Hammond: Thank you. And I was thinking maybe we could start the story by setting a scene, a case that you're working on, the who, what, why, where, when, how questions.

Ean Forsythe: So the first case that comes to mind that was really a formative experience for me in my career was the Ana Montes case. So I started working in the intelligence community before 9-11. I was a special agent with the National Security Agency at the time and I did entry level work doing background investigations, doing special investigations, and I'd always wanted to get into counterintelligence. I had the good fortune to get into the counterintelligence shop at NSA in June of 2001, where they assigned me to the Cuba target. And candidly, I was a little bit disappointed. I thought, well, I really want to work Russia, but maybe if I can prove myself on the Cubans, I can transition into the Russian target. And as it turned out, there was a major investigation going on at the time, Blue Wren, which was Ana Montes. I didn't work the investigation. She had already been identified. But because of the events of 9-11, her arrest date was accelerated because she was going to be doing bomb damage assessment on the campaign in Afghanistan. The director of DIA said we can't allow that to happen. So it was my good fortune to be able to debrief Ana Montes for NSA. And they don't exactly train you on how to talk to someone like Ana Montes. So my role was simply to try to elicit information from her to learn as much as possible. And I had the good fortune to be able to watch Pete Lapp and some of the FBI folks talk to her first. And I could sit back and kind of study the different approaches and think about how can I forge some common ground with Ana Montes. So Ana Montes was a graduate of the University of Virginia, very brainy, clever, sharp woman who ended up getting a master's degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Defense International Studies. And I didn't think there was really a point in kind of debating her worldview. I just wanted to find something in common with her. So at one point, I just sort of asked her, what did she miss most about life outside of prison? And she started telling me how she was a vegan and she liked really good organic vegetables. And she shopped at this place called Whole Foods, which at the time I had not heard of. And they were feeding her bologna sandwiches in prison. So I actually became a personal shopper for Ana Montes at Whole Foods. The first time I ever visited a Whole Foods was for Ana. So this was years before Instacart. And I started buying her fruits and vegetables. And we would kind of share our lunch. And at first, she was sort of asked for permission, but eventually got to the point where she would just go and share my lunch in my lunch bag. And something really interesting happened. I didn't intend it for being any kind of technique other than to build rapport and just to treat her with the dignity of a human being. And a couple of CIA guys that were watching the debriefing kind of liked the cut of my jab. They liked that approach. And they said, have you ever considered working for the CIA? And I said, I applied to the CIA out of college. I took the exam. You guys ghosted me. I never heard a yes. I never heard a no. Of course, I'd like to work for the CIA. So as luck would have it, Ana never penetrated the CIA, but she helped me penetrate the CIA because through working with her, I got recruited to work at the CIA.

Andrew Hammond: And what were some of her favorite fruits and vegetables?

Ean Forsythe: As I recall, she really liked organic carrots.

Andrew Hammond: Okay.

Ean Forsythe: I never knew that a carrot could be a status symbol, but you go into Whole Foods and you see this incredible lighting. And the quality of the carrots was a little better than what I was getting at the time as a GS-12 at Giant. So she liked kind of gnawing on these carrots during the debriefings. And you know, she would eat kind of throughout the debriefings. But when you go back and listen to the transcripts, letting a subject eat a carrot while they're talking, not a good idea, right? Because you go back and they sort of have that Bugs Bunny sound of gnawing on the carrot.

Andrew Hammond: Let's just take a step back for one second. Can you tell our listeners just briefly who Ana Montes was and why she's significant?

Ean Forsythe: Sure. So Ana Montes was born in West Germany. Her father was a military officer that was assigned abroad. She graduated from Loch Raven High School north of Baltimore, close to Towson, Maryland. And then she went to the University of Virginia, as I said, and did a study abroad program in Spain that really kind of, I think, was a formative experience in her life. It shaped her worldview. She went to a lot of rallies, a lot of protests that were anti-American, and it started to kind of change her identity. She later went to Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where this was during the Reagan administration's support of the Contras in Nicaragua. Ana became increasingly outspoken about the Reagan administration's policy. She argued that it was violating the Boland Amendment, which Congress had passed to prevent funding of the Contras. And, you know, fortuitously for the Cubans, they had an access swarm around her at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The one person that I would mention is Marta Velazquez, who was a fellow student. And Marta and Ana were close friends, and Marta was already a Cuban agent by the time she entered the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. And it was Marta who brokered an introduction for Ana to Cuban intelligence.

Andrew Hammond: Sorry, what did you say there, an access swarm?

Ean Forsythe: An access swarm. So what I mean by that is multiple talent spotters, multiple co-optees of the Cuban intelligence service, both professors and students who are already in a winning clandestine relationship with the Cuban intelligence service. So the important distinction there is you can have people that are useful, what the Cubans would call a useful link, who know that they're in contact with the Cuban government, but they don't necessarily know that they're in a clandestine relationship with military-like discipline. Marta and some others that I can't talk about were actually fully recruited agents of the Cuban intelligence service. So Ana Montes' closest friend at SAIS, Marta Velazquez, was a Cuban agent who was talent spotting her on behalf of the Cuban intelligence service. So it was a very easy recruitment. So basically you have Ana Montes 40 years ago in 1984 going on a lunch date with a friend and Marta Velazquez said, hey, would you be willing to fight U.S. imperialism by using your language ability to translate newspaper articles from English into Spanish so the Nicaraguan people can have access to information and defend themselves? So that's what we would call a soft pitch because she's not asking Ana to do anything illegal, she's just kind of feeling out her willingness to kind of help the cause and Ana Montes made the fateful decision to accept that meeting and to meet with the Cuban intelligence officer in New York and her life was never the same.

Andrew Hammond: So there's so many things that I want to pick up on there, Ean, because this stuff is really fascinating to me. One of them is for the long-term stuff, how does that go in terms of the careers of Cuban intelligence officers? Because one of the things like here you mentioned the difference between the cultures, like if you want to make a name for yourself, if you want to get promoted, if you want to get to the senior intelligence service, you need results quickly. Like saying that, well, I was the third person who managed an agent that won't bear fruit until another 15 years, that doesn't really get you anywhere in terms of your career. So do the Cubans not care about careerism, or are the incentives different or are they better at substituting their own desires and goals to those of the state, or like what's going on? Because that involves a whole different kind of almost HR approach to this kind of thing, right?

Ean Forsythe: So in the Cuban intelligence service, you put bread on the table for your family by showing results against the American target. So the first priority is to work against American students and American professors, and the rewards that you can get for recruiting an American are significant in a country where food security is an issue and where their officers might make $300 a month. If you recruit an American who's studying a semester at sea, you might get a beach vacation for a week, you might get a car, you might get an apartment. So the real talented people in the Cuban intelligence service want to work the U.S. target. So let's just talk a little bit about how they're structured. So the most important intelligence service in Cuba is the DGI or the General Director of Intelligence. That's their version of the CIA. And they're structured in departments. And so the first department, M1, is the U.S. target's department. And then they're further subdivided into sections. M11 targets the policymaking organs of the United States government. They target State Department, Congress, and the White House. M12 targets the U.S. intelligence community or the Department of Defense. So if you want to have results in Cuba, you want to work in those two sections. And you don't target people directly. You don't go to a CIA officer and say, here, I have an envelope of $10,000 to someone that's got a million dollars in their fair playing house. That's not how it works. They target young people on an ideological basis who may be disillusioned, disaffected, demotivated about the country and what the country represents. And they kind of get them in that academic environment where people are open and there's a marketplace of ideas. And then they convince them to apply. But if you want to move up in the world in the Cuban intelligence service, you need to have operational results. I don't want to say it's purely a meritocracy because there's definitely some nepotism. There's definitely some divides between the civilian and the military. But it is a results-based organization. And you have to show results against the U.S. target.

Andrew Hammond: Marta Velasquez is interesting, too, because if I remember correctly, she's Princeton, Georgetown, SAIS, Ana Montes, University of Virginia, a great school, SAIS. So there's intentionality behind this. And this also chimes with the Cambridge Five, right? They didn't go to the University of, you know, Outer Hertfordshire or something. They're going right to the place where people that are going to be policymakers, that are going to be part of the elite, are going to be trained or that are going to end up in senior positions within the British government. And in the case of Velasquez and Montes, the American government.

Ean Forsythe: That's exactly right. I mean, the Cubans essentially do what we would call an assessment of the operational situation of the schools. So what they do is they actually open a file or dossier on these institutions and they place a high priority on the most elite institutions in America, the most prestigious institutions, whose graduates will go on to become influential members of society, either in government or in the private sector. And I would say that this is one of the major advantages that Cubans have, is through geographical proximity, they understand our culture, they understand how America works, the system of America. So they understand that if you're going to go into the intelligence community, you need to be a credentialed member of the elite. So they'll study these schools, they'll download all the information that's available publicly, and they'll start kind of mapping out what the schools look like in the different departments. And they're trying to identify who are the people that are going to be interested in public service or interested in academic exchange or study abroad program. And they will literally study thousands of people and create thousands of dossiers and files on people to find that one person who's willing to enter into a clandestine relationship. So it's actually, even though it's a small island and it's a small, small organization, they're launching a massive attack on our academic institutions because it's paid such strong dividends for them over the years. And it's an investment that doesn't cost a lot of money. It just requires skill, discipline, and tradecraft, which they have in abundance. And I would make the argument that the Cuban student has long ago surpassed the Russian teacher and the Russian master. So when I think about what kind of a threat Cuba represents the United States, and when we talk to students about this kind of thing, we think, what are the capabilities of the service? What are their intentions? And what are the U.S. vulnerabilities? Because the Cubans know us so well, they're able to exploit our vulnerabilities. The DGI was founded in 1961 by a man named Manuel Pineiro or Redbeard or Barbarrojo. A lot of people don't know, but Barbarrojo went to Columbia University in the 1950s. His father was a very wealthy distributor of alcohol. He sent his son to Columbia. So Pineira went to Columbia in the 50s. His first wife is actually an American woman who studied dance at Julliard. So Pineira was able to recruit a lot of talented people around him. And I think very early on, he and others had the vision of understanding how America works, and that you want to be in those universities just to influence the perception of the Cuban regime. So active measures and disinformation are important. Cuba is a closed society, so they try to manipulate what the rest of the world thinks of Cuba. So they're there first for influence to try to get people to change the U.S. public policy toward Cuba, but then also to spot and assess and kind of do their version of the Cambridge Five. So in a lot of ways, the Cuban network is really built as a sequel of the Cambridge Five. The Cambridge Five legacy lives on.

Andrew Hammond: So I thought it was quite interesting what you said earlier was that Stalinism knocked the romantic spin off of working for the Soviet Union. But then you were mentioning the Latin twist. So you can think about it like Soviet techniques and methodologies, but with the famous image of Che Guevara by Alexander Korda, or Fidel Castro with a cigar. So it's kind of like romanticized again, that kind of nastiness is taken off of it. It's not a big behemoth that just grinds down human lives. It's a plucky underdog standing up against Yankee imperialism or something. Is that what you were getting at?

Ean Forsythe: That's what I'm getting at. So I think you've got it, is some of these Cuban intelligence officers that did this work began in the '60s were very cultured, right? And they would talk to prospective recruits about things like Cuban dance, Cuban ballet, and they would emphasize things that they were culturally proud of. They weren't talking about sort of economic determinism. And if anything, it was more what I would call cultural Marxism and anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism. And they're looking for people that are opposed to American imperialism, whatever that means. They're not necessarily talking about doctrinaire economic Marxism. It's just about resistance to the United States and the United States way of life. And they're looking for people who are not culturally confident as Americans, people who may have been taught to be highly critical of the nation's founding principles. So they're looking for people that aren't comfortable in their identity as Americans. And I think that's one of the things that happened with Diana Montes is she fell in with an Argentine Marxist in Spain and she became essentially embarrassed to be an American because she went to a lot of these street rallies in Spain. And she said, I started to become more comfortable with the European social democracies and their approach to meeting the needs of the population. So probably if the Cubans bump up against someone who looks at America as a beacon of hope and liberty for the world and freedom, they're not going to really be able to make a lot of progress. But people can have any point of view they want in our country. It's a free country and the First Amendment, of course. But Cubans are looking for people that are progressive, but that have a real issue with the nation going all the way back to its founding principles. And that's part of the active measures that some of their professors will promote in these universities. And that's why they target professors as well as students. They want people, they want students to be demotivated and they want to delegitimize the institutions of American government to set the stage for, hey, you can have the purpose of your life can be to try to check U.S. imperialism. So it's very much a battle of ideas that I think a lot of Americans don't realize we're still in this battle. Right? For a lot of us, the Cold War ended. Fukuyama was writing about the end of history in 1989. And the West thought, okay, our ideas are universal. But I don't think the Cold War ever ended for Vladimir Putin or for Fidel Castro or the Cuban intelligence service. And you can't really win an intelligence conflict you don't know that you're in. So one of the things that they do very effectively is they manipulate this perception that Cuba is not a threat to the United States. So I tell people the greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince people he didn't exist. And some of our policymakers don't understand that when the Cubans recruit someone like an Ana Montes and she infiltrates DIA, the damage is not localized in Havana. When you work for the Cuban intelligence service, when you make the decision to work for the Cuban intelligence service, you are indirectly at the service of all of America's enemies because the Cubans do humans to so well. It's a commodity that can be bartered or traded. And just like intelligence diplomacy is important to the US and to England, they have their own liaison relationships. So when they steal information, that's being trafficked and shared with regimes in Tehran and Beijing and Caracas and Moscow. So if you're concerned about Russian espionage and if you're concerned about Chinese espionage, you have to be concerned about Cuban espionage as well because they enable collection operations for all those other services as well.

Andrew Hammond: I remember reading this book about Cold War London and it was talking about how when there was a mass expulsion of Soviet diplomats, the Cubans would basically act as a surrogate for them because I think it said something like 70% of diplomats were actually intelligence officers for the Cubans. So even back then they could function as people that passed off information to third parties.

Ean Forsythe: They do. They do work together. But I don't want people to think of the Cubans simply as a proxy of the Russians because, you know, they're a proud people and they have their own operational accomplishments and they're certainly nationalists.

Andrew Hammond: Sure.

Ean Forsythe: And I think there's a tendency sort of in the United States to continue to underestimate them. And we've underestimated them at our own peril.

Andrew Hammond: Tell me if you think I'm wrong, but I feel like some of the underestimation comes from this framing through a Soviet lens because the Soviets, that threat is over. Therefore, you know, it's a logical conclusion that the Cuban threat is less because they're surrogates of the Soviets.

Ean Forsythe: I think you're right. I think if we look at them as sort of an extension of the Soviets, we say we won, the game is over, but the competition continues, right? There's seldom an end point in intelligence conflicts and in spy wars. It just kind of goes on and on. And some of those techniques still work. And as long as the Cuban revolution is still in play and the Castro regime is still in play, the number one objective of the DGI is to preserve and protect the Cuban government, the Cuban regime. So that has not changed for the Cubans. But I think there's a tendency here to say, oh, what does it matter anyway? They're not a threat to us. And that's, of course, some of their influence operations is to convince us that they don't matter and they're not a threat. They represent a threat in their own right, completely independent of any connection with Russia.

Andrew Hammond: And what was the after story of Marta Velasquez for our listeners?

Ean Forsythe: So the after story of Marta Velasquez is Marta Velasquez started dating a Swedish diplomat and she ended up marrying the Swedish diplomat and through him she obtained Swedish citizenship. So she's now living in Sweden because espionage is not an extraditable offense. It's considered a political offense. So she's living in Sweden and although it's publicly known that she's spied, she's not been held accountable in a legal way. So Jim Popkin wrote a book called "Codename Blue Wren", which is a very good book about the Montes case. And he has some details in there about Marta Velasquez and he hired an investigator to go over and kind of take a look at her, take some pictures. So apparently she's teaching in a Swedish school. So you think about her active work as an espionage agent is over, she's not collecting documents anymore. But what is she teaching those Swedish kids in the schools, right? So I look at someone like Marta Velasquez, is she still working for the cause in some way? Is she still trying to indoctrinate young people? So could you imagine being in this affluent suburb of Stockholm and Marta Velasquez is your kid's teacher? What are they learning under her tutelage?

Andrew Hammond: When you're doing this interrogation or interviewing of Ana Montes, what is coming to you? Are you getting psychological reports or are you getting transcripts of previous interviews that she's had? Or are you getting bios? What's the information stream that's coming to you other than you just tentatively trying to figure out how to talk to her? You must be getting briefed somehow. You must be getting information somehow.

Ean Forsythe: So we collaborate with different departments and agencies. So the FBI has been really good about letting people observe before they have to actually talk and share usually transcripts. So the National Counterintelligence Security Center is responsible for damage assessment processes. So it's really a national effort. So typically what happens is people leave their agencies, they sort of take their agency cap off and they're detailed to this national effort. Because when you have a case like Ana Montes, there's more than one victim agency, right? Multiple agencies are sort of victimized. So what we try to do is have a very collaborative approach and say, okay, the law enforcement phase has ended. This is now an intelligence collection effort where we need to understand what is the adversary knowledge of our sources and methods. And what are the implications? What are the CI implications of this case? So yes, you're getting information from a variety of sources. And you like to prepare. But there can be a danger in over-preparing. Because if you have a really detailed plan and you get in there and it doesn't go well, Mike Tyson always said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. So it's more art than science. I definitely like to do some preparation, but I want it to be a real conversation. And it's difficult to establish rapport when there's six or seven or eight people in the room. I prefer to kind of do this one-on-one or no more than two people in the room. When I talked to Kendall Meyers, our penetration of the State Department, I made a point of having lunch with him or staying with his lunch hour, because that was the only time that he and I could be alone. And they kind of turned the tape recorder off. So I really started to understand what he was like as a person. He was a native Washingtonian. He was born in the 1930s. And we would have conversations of what it was like growing up in Washington. And I made the comparison. I said, you know who you remind me of? You remind me of Kim Fielding. He was fascinated, intrigued by that. He said, why do I remind you of Fielding? I said, surely your social class and standing made you very effective in your agent work. And he said, that's absolutely right. It was a great cover, because who could suspect me? So I like to have those kind of spontaneous conversations, just about a variety of things, exchange books, exchange ideas, talk about stuff that's not related to debriefing requirements, just to kind of get to understand them on the human level. And that's what I did with Kendall. And I thought it was much more effective to kind of talk to him one-on-one and kind of really understand who he was and what were the key inflection points in his life before he made this decision to work for the Cubans.

Andrew Hammond: It's kind of like this podcast interview. We have a game plan and terrain we want to cover, but we're going down interesting alleys and stuff. So I just think it's quite interesting to follow up and make it a real conversation. So just very briefly before we move on, Kendall Myers, just so our listeners aren't scrambling for who he is, just a brief overview on him.

Ean Forsythe: Kendall Myers was Washington Elite Society by birth. His grandfather was Gilbert Grosvenor, who edited the National Geographic magazine for 55 years. His great grandfather was Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone. And Kendall went to a prep school in Pennsylvania, enlisted in the Army, and then ultimately worked for the State Department Foreign Service Institute. He was adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins School of International Studies. All of his life, he was a bit of a contrarian. When I talked to him, he had a very difficult, prickly relationship with his mother. So I asked him at one point -- he's a very proud man. So your listeners can go and take a look at the photograph of the arrest. It's quite astonishing. I've never seen an arrest photo like that. So Kendall Myers doppelganger is probably the late, great Donald Sutherland. So imagine the six-foot, six-inch, very patrician looking man that looks just like Donald Sutherland. And if you look at his arrest photo, his chin is up in the air and that's sort of very Kendall. He's very proud. He has the confidence that one would expect of a member of his class. He grew up in a house that was built in 1926. It's 4,700 square feet. It's a very proper neighborhood and a great neighborhood in Northwest DC, just south of Spring Valley on 45th Street. I'm sure the current residents wouldn't want me to give out the address, but it's worth like $4.3 million now. So he had this really privileged upbringing and just always liked being contrarian. But the difficult relationship with his mother started early because when I was talking to him, he recalled that one of the pivotal events in his life is he couldn't read until he was nine years old. So he has dyslexia and he was always sort of felt to be the black sheep of the family because his brothers were very talented and skilled at school. And the way the educational system was teaching him at the time was not the way his mind worked. So he started to develop some of these feelings of inadequacy at age nine and had this prickly relationship with his mother. So when I asked him, what are you most proud of? He said, I gave this beautiful eulogy for my mother and nobody knew that I hated her. I hated her most of my life. So think about the compartmentalization and how you would take pride in hating, concealing the fact that you hate your mother. So there's a lot going on there that the shrinks can probably assess. So you would think that being born into this family with all this tremendous wealth and privilege would be a gift, but he looked at it as a little bit more of a burden, right? So noblesse oblige, he's born on third base and kind of trips his way into home, but his great grandfather invented the telephone. What is he going to do to be able to top that? So I think he was looking for a path of distinction, something that would make him special. And I think the Cubans made him feel very special. And I think they were interested in him because of his social background and his social connections. So you've got to tip your hat to the Cuban intelligence service that they see the informational potential of someone like a Kendall Myers.

Andrew Hammond: The modus operandi of Cuban intelligence. What does the Ana Montes story tell us about Cuban intelligence? If we were to use that as an instructive example, what would it tell us?

Ean Forsythe: What it would tell us is that they're present in universities in the Northeast and they are hunting for people that are willing to work for them clandestinely. And when they find someone that expresses a particular political view, they're going to put them under study more intensively, right? They're going to make them more of a priority and they're going to find out some of these social and psychological factors you talked about, whether they would be suitable for a clandestine relationship that requires a high level of discipline, or if they would be better used just becoming a professor themselves or working at a think tank and doing influence. So there are many, many people that are under evaluation. And I think what the Ana Montes case tells us is why it's worth doing for them. Why it's worth literally studying thousands of professors and students, developing files on thousands of them, because they might get a diamond in the rough like Ana Montes that has great potential and they can see the kind of potential. And it's actually kind of a weird dynamic where when these young students agree to work for the Cubans, they actually get mentored by the Cuban intelligence service on how to kind of navigate the system. And they know Washington really well. So you're actually getting career counseling and career consultations with the Cubans because they're positioning you into positions of greater access. So it's not the kind of mentoring you want because your mentors never end up in jail. You're going to be in jail, but they're very shrewd in their approaches. And again, it's long-range work and strategic patience. So you can recruit someone like Kendall Myers when he's an out-of-work college professor in South Dakota doing elder care for his mother-in-law and then wait another 17 years until he works in INR, the intelligence wing of the State Department.

Andrew Hammond: Tell us a little bit more about Cuban intelligence officers. I know you can't necessarily go into figures, but are there lots of people that are NOCs working under non-official cover? Are most of them posing as diplomats? Is that a combination of both? Who are these people?

Ean Forsythe: So they're highly educated people that the Cubans tend to recruit from universities, people that have a background in psychology. They recruit from their medical school, their law school, very talented people, elite members of their society, upper crust, and a lot of people that really want to be able to work internationally, right? So we certainly see generational differences in the U.S. intelligence workforce. I wonder if they're dealing with that now and what their issues are like dealing with Gen Z. So Cuba, if you're listening, tell me about your hiring difficulties of that newer generation, but really talented, bright people. And then they send them for intelligence training and espionage techniques and languages and analysis. But I'd rather not get into all the different covers that they use.

Andrew Hammond: Okay. Okay.

Ean Forsythe: But what I would say is the important thing to note is it's a relatively small organization by comparison to U.S. size, but they make up for that by having a more narrow collection focus and focusing on us. They have a high degree of specialization. Right? So in the U.S. intelligence community, we tend to bounce around every two years, and it's important to show that you do different things. In Cuba, you specialize not only in the United States, but in some instances, you specialize by U.S. government agency. So Andrew, you're the State Department guy. I work DOD. So they have a lot of depth of expertise that it's difficult to match, right? So you might be working against people that have 25 years working against the U.S. intelligence community. So really impressive specialization in the service, bright people, hardworking people, people that, you know, some people in the service go home at five o'clock and they're drinking and carousing. Other people are working late at night, you know, processing information. And what I would say about them is they collect more information than they can possibly use and they can even process. So that gets back to what we talked about in terms of it being a commodity for sale. So these are people that in many cases, some of them are dedicated to the Cuban Revolution. In other cases, I think they just like the ability to travel.

Andrew Hammond: And I've got a couple of quotes here just talking about their effectiveness and why they're so good. A couple of quotes here from the former head of counterintelligence for the CIA, Jim Olson. So these are recent quotes. I think one of them is in relation to the arrest of Ambassador Rocha, which we cannot talk about, but he's saying, I would rank them as probably the most aggravating intelligence service I've ever worked against. That's not just because they're so devious and so ruthless, but because they're so good. And then he continues elsewhere. He said that the Cuban DGI had successfully run 38 double agents against us. So every agent that we thought we'd recruited on the island was in fact being controlled by the DGI. They owned us. They beat us. I mean, that's from a legend of the CIA's counterintelligence field. That's high praise, grudging and obviously through the lens of an American intelligence officer. But like, why are they so good? Why is Jim Olson saying these types of things about them?

Ean Forsythe: So Jim Olson wrote a book called "To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence" that I use as a textbook at the National Intelligence University. And Jim Olson has the 10 commandments of counterintelligence. And I think his first rule of counterintelligence is be offensive. Counterintelligence that is passive and defensive is doomed to fail. So one of the things that I would say is the approach that the Cubans take to counterintelligence is worth studying. Because in the U.S., we tend to have kind of a passive defensive reactive approach to counterintelligence. We're focusing on denial. We're focusing on a lot of sort of security measures. The Cubans employ what I would call sort of an active offense. And by that, I mean, they're looking for conduits of information where they can convey disinformation or misinformation to U.S. intelligence. So they want to control as much of our collection as possible. So for your listeners, when Jim Olson uses the term double agent, that has a very specific connotation. Ana Montes is not a double agent. Rick Ames is not a double agent. These people are not double agents. They're penetrations or moles. A double agent is a form of counterfeit espionage. So a Cuban passport holder pretends to be working for the CIA, but he's actually under the control of his own service. So Cuba very aggressively uses double agents to pass controlled information. And the reason they do that is they understand that leadership can have a cognitive bias. So once they understand that somebody has a certain cognitive bias, they'll play to that cognitive bias of that policymaker. So they have deception planners that are actually trying to deceive and mislead, just offer a distorted view of reality so that we see something that they want us to see, and then we think what they want us to think about it, and then we do what they want us to do. We take action based on our distorted beliefs. So I think what Jim Olson is essentially saying is the Cubans practice an active form, an active offensive form of counterintelligence that we would be wise to practice ourselves. Now, obviously not everything can scale because we have to spy in a way that's consistent with our values as a people, but you got to give the Cubans their due for being so aggressive and offensive and strategic in their approach to counterintelligence. And their service puts a huge emphasis on counterintelligence, and I think this is part of the reason they're so effective.

Andrew Hammond: And tell us about the dangers of being a counterintelligence officer for your career as well. So for example, say I'm doing counterintelligence here at the Spy Museum. If I catch some contractors doing something, then it's not going to make a lot of waves, but if I start getting further up the hierarchy, and then when you start getting to those levels, there's lots of embarrassing friendships and connections and so forth. I mean, you're really walking consciously into a hornet's nest, or you could be potentially in some ways, and we've seen that historically. So I mean, it almost seems like there's a certain amount of, you could either call it bravery or foolhardiness involved in being a counterintelligence officer, potentially. Would you agree with that?

Ean Forsythe: I would. I think what you're talking about is what I call counterintelligence. So that's when you have a nice little housebroken terrier on a very short leash, and he's going to only hunt and search for the mole that the owner says. The counterintelligence we need is more like a Rottweiler that gets off the leash and occasionally goes and bites the mailman, right? So if you're going to be aggressive and you're going to chase perfidy wherever it's found, if you start reaching into the commanding heights of our institutions, well, that's going to be problematic, and that's going to make everybody look bad, and you're going to be the proverbial skunk at the garden party, and you're not going to be invited to the cool parties in Georgetown, right? So there is some reputational risk to you as an officer to do this stuff seriously. So what I often find is people that are really good at this just don't care. I don't know whether you call it foolhardy, or you could almost do a social history of the counterintelligence officers that are quite good and find that maybe they're married to people that make a ton of money outside of government, and they're doing it as hobby or sport, that they're not really relying on what the organization is going to do for them. So those are some of the people that I've really come to trust and respect because they have a level of autonomy and agency that you don't often see in someone who's just worried about climbing the ranks. So it's almost as if their career is perhaps not as important as someone else's career who's the breadwinner in the family.

Andrew Hammond: So let's talk a little bit more about Cuban intelligence and the US. Can we break it down by region or city? So we've got big Cuban communities in New York City, and obviously, we've got the UN General Assembly there. We've got Washington DC, the seat of American government. We've got Miami, which, of course, is very close to Cuba and the whole eastern seaboard, really. Like, where is Cuban intelligence taking place in this country? And maybe we can zero in on some of those locations. Sure, it's taking place in all those locations that you talked about, but particularly in Miami, they're concerned about sort of the Cuban exile population. And what threats from a Cuban point of view, it's defensive. It's, well, we have to protect ourselves against the Miami Cuban crowd and why they make a move on Cuba. So they're doing quite a bit of collection against the exile targeting. And then here in Washington, in New York, they're doing traditional espionage operations. Okay. And for Cuban intelligence, how much are they communist agencies? Is this just like a fig leaf? It's like a name, but, you know, no one really believes in this stuff anymore. Or is it like it's embedded into the very culture of Cuban intelligence?

Ean Forsythe: I think that they have a faith system of sorts, whether it's all communism or Castro-ism or anti-Americanism. I think that the one link that kind of cuts across all of them is they're nationalists. They're proud, right? They want to be sovereign. They want to be the boss of their own lives. So I would say they're nationalists and a number of the people that are in the important positions are certainly anti-American. Are they actually doctrinaire Marxists? I don't think so. I don't think so.

Andrew Hammond: Okay. And what was Cuban intelligence like before the revolution in '59?

Ean Forsythe: So if you talk about, you know, Batista, they had their own counterintelligence capabilities. But, you know, Fidel had counterintelligence capabilities when he was up in the mountains in Sierra Maestra. The movement had to have counterintelligence for it to be successful. And Fidel Castro, as a spy master, was very formidable. Certainly understood that information was power. So they do all of these things to give a decision advantage to Cuban policymakers, which, you know, for much of the time period we're talking about, was really Fidel, right? So you know, what is the measure of effectiveness of an intelligence service or a counterintelligence service? How do we determine if they're doing a good job? One way to think about it is, have they provided information that provides decision advantage to the policymaker? And I think by that metric, you could argue that, you know, up until Fidel stepped off the stage in 2006 because of diverticulitis, he may have been playing a game of poker with the United States where he knew our whole cards, right? So a lot of times people sort of think about Montez or Myers or these other cases you alluded to. What advantage does that give the Cubans for doing denial deception operations against us? Because they have a feedback loop. Now, if I'm playing poker with you and I know your whole cards, I can probably take all your money tonight. And Fidel effectively knew our whole cards. And I think he leveraged that espionage very effectively in a number of ways. And if you look at some of Fidel's old speeches that were six hours long, you'll hear at times he'll talk about, well, you may not believe it, but this revolution has friends. And he starts to sort of provide information that perhaps was acquired clandestinely. And I think some of his operatives were concerned that he would blow an operation, but to my knowledge, he never did. So I think if you look at kind of the relationship between the collector and the consumer, I think that worked very well. I think Fidel was a very clever consumer and wanted a lot of raw reporting.

Andrew Hammond: And how much of a public profile do the heads of Cuban intelligence have? Are they under the radar or are they out in the open like Bill Burns?

Ean Forsythe: They're not as out in the open, no. So I mean, they fall under the Ministry of Interior. And I think the Minute Chief might be out in the open, but I think kind of the lower level people, I don't think they're known for radical transparency.

Andrew Hammond: Yeah. What about some of the major operations that they've been involved in? So we can skirt some of the more recent stuff we've seen in the headlines, but let's talk about the Cuban Five if we can.

Ean Forsythe: Sure. So the Cuban Five was a network of operatives in South Florida that was led by Gerardo Hernandez. And the Cubans kind of portrayed it as a defensive effort to keep an eye on Cuban exile organizations that might be launching terrorist attacks. But they were also collecting information on military bases and kind of looking at signal numbers. And they had penetrated the Brothers to the Rescue organization, which was flying planes across the seaboard to try to identify migrants that needed assistance from the Coast Guard. And these folks were wrapped up by a very effective FBI counterintelligence operation and they were arrested in the late '90s. And one of the things I find interesting about the Cuban Five is that became kind of their primary cause for their solidarity groups around the country. And they were very skilled, once again, because they understand our legal system. They appealed those sentences all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and they were represented by very talented counsel. So you think about the implications of that. And at one point, there was some decision from an appellate court that remanded the case down to the district court. And their sentences were reduced at one point for a couple of the defendants. So the Cubans were able to very effectively work the legal system and say, basically, these people couldn't get a fair trial in South Florida because the place was so inflamed and therefore, you committed error. So I think that's a good example of how the Cubans know our legal system really well. And they sort of use all the advantages that we have as citizens, sometimes against us. And some of their best work is done within the confines of the U.S. legal system. Because it's not illegal to talk to a professor who might be a cultural Marxist and encourage him to have his students come down and study in Cuba. There's nothing illegal about that, but it's still preparatory work for intelligence purposes. So the Cuban Five, fascinating in terms of the legal defense. And yeah, I think you can look up, your listeners can look up Gerardo Hernandez now, and I think he's playing a political role. He's considered a hero of the revolution.

Andrew Hammond: For this type of work, how much do the defense and the offense cooperate? So for example, doing counterintelligence, you mentioned all enemies, foreign and domestic. You're concentrating on the domestic. So you're, you know, you guys, you're the linebackers, the defensive linemen and so forth. Do you also have to liaise with people in Cuba that are, you know, the quarterback and the tight end and the wide receiver and so forth? And I don't expect you to go into any details, of course, but is there much kind of interplay between the offense and the defense in this sense?

Ean Forsythe: There is. And I think that gets into kind of the value of counterintelligence planning and having a national counterintelligence strategy. So when you think about what are the aims of counterintelligence, what is counterintelligence trying to do? When I think of defensive counterintelligence, it's trying to protect, it's trying to identify methods, it's trying to, you know, detect things and ultimately make it more difficult. When you think on the offensive side of the house, it's really about neutralization and deception. So there are different schools of thought, you know, should deception be part of counterintelligence or not? But those things need to be kind of synchronized because, you know, for me, a lot of it is are we taking the initiative? Who has the initiative in intelligence conflict? Are we fighting this on our heels and we're doing too much passive defense, or are we doing active offense and we're taking the initiative? Cuba, and I think you already alluded to that with some of those Jim Olson quotes, is relentless. They're aggressive and they're bold and they take the initiative to us. And for a number of people in the Cuban counterintelligence committee are going to say, I don't want to be always reacting to successes they've had. I want to be more proactive. So I think that that calls for really close coordination. So when the president signs a national counterintelligence strategy that has a number of goals and objectives, how do we coordinate closely to implement that? And do we have a national counterintelligence program that could actually implement those goals and objectives? So that's something the National Counterintelligence Security Center has been involved in and I was involved in drafting part of it. And when you look at it, it requires a high level of synchronization and somebody needing to act as sort of the conductor of the orchestra so that we're all sort of singing the same tune. And the part of it that would be relevant to the Cuban discussion would be things like, are we neutralizing foreign influence efforts? I think as we've already talked about, foreign influence efforts can be much deeper than just picking, trying to influence an election. It can be trying to shape and demotivate people. So yes, I think a lot of coordination needs to be happening between sort of the offensive and defensive sides of the house.

Andrew Hammond: And what's the most misunderstood thing about counterintelligence? When you meet either the average person on the street or even people in the field that are not in the counterintelligence world, what's the one thing that you come across that you're like, no, they're not. I want this on the record, Andrew. This is not what counterintelligence is. Or what's a common misunderstanding?

Ean Forsythe: I think a common misunderstanding is sort of conflating counterintelligence and security. I think when a lot of people think of counterintelligence, they think of guards, guns, and alarms. And security is a separate but related discipline that can assist counterintelligence. But I don't necessarily think people are understanding that it's an instrument of national power designed to neutralize the adversary's collection or turn the adversary's collection into an instrument of your power and get them to collect and see what you want them to see. So I think oftentimes counterintelligence is hard for people to understand. So they kind of glom on to what they see in the movies, and they think of it as in a primarily defensive setting. So I would say it's important to kind of keep those two disciplines different and to come up with a clear definition of counterintelligence. So there's some talk about doing this or kind of updating it in the statutory authority. But Executive Order 12333 defines counterintelligence as activities conducted to protect against espionage. So a lot of times these terms are not clearly defined. So I think it'd be very hard to understand what are we talking about when we're talking about counterintelligence versus counterespionage? Or what does it mean when we say offensive counterintelligence? What is strategic counterintelligence? So again, I think that people in the academic community and some outsiders or people like Jim Olson could do great service for us and kind of help coming up with a theory of counterintelligence that could frame the discipline.

Andrew Hammond: And just as we close out, Ean, can you tell our listeners a little bit more about what you do now?

Ean Forsythe: So I am the National Counterintelligence and Security Center Chair at the National Intelligence University. So for your background, for your listeners, NIU is the intelligence community's accredited federal degree-granting institution. And it's really unique in both the academic and national security realms because the long-term educational goals of the university are purposely aligned with the National Intelligence Strategy of the United States. So NIU offers a Bachelor of Science in Intelligence, a Master of Science in Strategic Intelligence, and a Master of Science in Technical Intelligence, as well as a Certificate in Intelligence Studies. So our students come from the intelligence community, military, and other federal departments and agencies. And so I've sort of given up being a practitioner of counterintelligence, and I've decided to teach because when I was working on the upcoming National Counterintelligence Strategy, one of our goals was really to build a resilient CI community. And it started to occur to me that we need more bench strength. We need to encourage young people to enter into this career. And I took a page from the Cubans, and I saw how much time they spent working at universities. So I said, why don't I work at a university? Why don't I try to find my replacement and coach other people, inspire other people to do this? So I'm very grateful. It's a wonderful assignment. NIU is a wonderful place. And what we're really trying to do is stimulate an interest in lifelong learning, getting away from lectures where people are only going to retain 5% to 10% and give them some experiential learning. So we're really grateful to you, Andrew, and to the Spy Museum for offering some of those experiences for our students because the world is changing so rapidly that I think that if we don't focus on lifelong learning, if we see ourselves as a finished product, we're going to become stale. So if our listeners are in the government, check out our website at niu.edu. Don't go to Northwest Illinois. Go to the National Intelligence University. And if you already have a master's, take a look at our certificate options, which make a lot of sense for people that are mid-career because a lot of people in the intelligence community have a master's before they enter, so they're not necessarily looking for a second master's. That's okay. We understand that. But I would highlight our certificate programs because you can come in, be exposed to intellectual diversity, meet people from other organizations, and it offers you tremendous networking opportunities, and then to kind of tackle really challenging problems and kind of talk through things and examine some of those key assumptions that we might have. So NIU is a place where we're trying to really innovate and prepare the intelligence community leaders of tomorrow for a threat environment that I think is going to be a lot tougher than what I faced for the bulk of my career. So I don't envy these folks, but it's always very energizing, Andrew, to be in a room with people that work in the intelligence community all day and then come in and pursue a master's degree at night. I've got a little bit of a spring in my step every evening when we can come in and teach people counterintelligence. So that's what I'm doing now. So I'm not a practitioner any longer, but I enjoy teaching and it's the right assignment at the right time for me.

Andrew Hammond: And final question, slightly playful, all of this training and experience that you've had and counterintelligence and so forth, have you been able to tell if, I don't know, a friend, a colleague, a wife, a daughter or something is trying to pull one over on you?

Ean Forsythe: I'm glad you asked that. I'm actually only average at detecting deception.

Andrew Hammond: Okay.

Ean Forsythe: I had to have kids before I could figure out that I was overrating my ability to detect deception. So my wife is much better at detecting when my kids are lying than I am because I want to believe them. So Malcolm Gladwell talks about how we default to the truth in his book, "Talking to Strangers". And I'm guilty of that. When my young kid looks at me and tells me a tall one, I come up with some reason why he's telling me the truth. So my life experience now, I tell people I'm not a human lie detector by any stretch of imagination. My wife is much better at detecting deception than I am.

Andrew Hammond: Well, thanks ever so much. It's been a pleasure to speak to you.

Ean Forsythe: It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me on. [ Music ]

Andrew Hammond: Thanks for listening to this episode of "SpyCast". Please follow us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next week on "SpyCast".

Guest: So I went and took myself on an entrepreneurial journey, taught myself search engine optimization in 1999 and used those skills, those skills in search engine optimization to actually get a $100 million contract in Abu Dhabi.

Andrew Hammond: If you have feedback, you can reach us by email at spycast.spymuseum.org or on X at @intlspycast. If you go to our page at thecyberwire.com /podcast/spycast, you can find links to further resources, detailed show notes and full transcripts. I'm your host, Andrew Hammond, and my podcast content partner is Erin Dietrick. The rest of the team involved in the show is Mike Mincey, Memphis Vaughn III, Emily Coletta, Emily Renz, Afua Anokwa, Ariel Samuel, Elliot Pelzmann, Trey Hester and Jen Eiben. This show is brought to you from the home of the world's preeminent collection of intelligence and espionage related artifacts, the International Spy Museum. [ Music ]