Cuba's Spies, Defectors, and the Ex-FBI Agent Who Met Them All

Sasha Ingber: Welcome to SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week, I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

For decades, Cuban intelligence has been seen as a force that punches above its weight. Shaped during the Cold War through cooperation with the Soviet Union, its intelligence officers received extensive training by the KGB.

But where does its spy service stand today, especially as it faces pressure from Washington? Retired FBI Special Agent Peter Lapp, who wrote Queen of Cuba, came in to discuss Havana's capabilities, the Americans who spied for Cuba, and the Cubans who spied for us.

Welcome, Pete. Good to see you again. 

Peter Lapp: It's always great to see you, Sasha.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. 

Sasha Ingber: So let's get right down to it. 

Peter Lapp: Okay. 

Sasha Ingber: What was it like being in the FBI, working counterintelligence, going after the Cubans? 

Peter Lapp: Uh, surreal, and also kind of an experience where I didn't think that's what I was going to do in the FBI. Um, my background was I was a cop outside of Philadelphia, and I was a criminal justice major, and I thought the FBI, in its infinite wisdom, would put me working the cool stuff, the gangs and drugs and homicides, and they said, "No, you're going to work Cuban counterintelligence."

I had no idea what that was and what that meant, and I, I could find Cuba on a map barely, and that was about the extent of it. And I was, uh... I, I say I was... When I got the assignment and got to the field office in DC in September of 1998, I was a little disgruntled, to be honest with you, 'cause I thought I wasn't working the cool stuff, yet the cool stuff is what has me sitting down here today, because if I didn't work the Cubans, I wouldn't be here.

So your... Life works out the way it's supposed to, and I'm, I'm 

Sasha Ingber: Yeah, it was all really so that you could sit down with SpyCast. 

Peter Lapp: 100%. 

Sasha Ingber: So what was the learning curve? Take us into just day to day- 

Peter Lapp: Yeah ... 

Sasha Ingber: what it was like learning about what the Cubans were up to. 

Peter Lapp: The Cubans are a lot different than China and Russia.

You know, Cuba is a small intelligence service. It's not big, but it's mighty. They're always, in my opinion, accomplishing a lot more than their numbers in terms of how many people they have working for it. Um, they've got a great ability to find individuals who aren't motivated by money and aren't Cuban by descent but have this visceral empathy for what Cuba is trying to accomplish, whether it's in Latin America or throughout the rest of the world.

So they have a unique way of operating. The difficult part of getting to understand the Cubans was really focusing, in my opinion, not on the day-to-day activity of the intelligence officers we were following, but the the unsub investigations, the unknown subjects, the people that were later identified as Ana Montes or the folks down in Miami, all of those cases were the core, in my opinion, part of the program, the Cuban program, that required a lot of focus and creativity, luck in trying to find some of these individuals.

'Cause those were the core individuals that were inside our government spying against us, trusted insiders, but who were actually loyal to the Cubans. That was the big learning curve that I had, and actually the real intriguing puzzle of trying to identify any one of these individuals, these unsubs as we call them.

And, you know, with regards to Montes, we got, we got lucky with one, and, and then subsequently several after that. 

Sasha Ingber: And you actually broke into her home here in Washington. 

Peter Lapp: Legally. I had... We had a court order. Right. I had to make sure that we, you know, got the legal part going, yes. 

Sasha Ingber: Right, but she didn't know you were doing it.

Let's just say that. 

Peter Lapp: No. 

Sasha Ingber: She did not know that you were walking in that door, and she had spied for Cuba for 17 years. 

Peter Lapp: Yes. 

Sasha Ingber: She was recruited as a student, rose to the top position as Cuba analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency. What was it like when you finally opened the door to her home? 

Peter Lapp: Oh, oh, surreal.

Like, the cat burglar kind of thing. It was a pretty cool moment, I have to, I have to be honest with you. I had- As a police officer, I had done some things where you were potentially going to get shot, and the adrenaline and the exhilaration of that is pretty significant. But when you have the key and you're sneaking in, I felt the adrenaline even higher because the possibility of getting caught either by a neighbor or, you know, she was in Miami at the time, and we had surveillance on her, so we knew she wasn't gonna come home.

But what if we put a book back the wrong way, and she knew that that book was in a certain way? So that kind of exhilaration, it was really pretty, pretty cool. And I... And, and you're also not just going and sneaking around and just walking into her apartment. You're looking for elements of the intelligence craft that, that she was using and trying to prove that she was committing espionage.

Sasha Ingber: And what did you see when you finally stepped in the door? 

Peter Lapp: A lot of books. She was well-read, and she wasn't getting paid for her espionage, so she lived pretty modestly, although I will say it was a very nice co-op building in, in, uh, Cleveland Park in a very nice neighborhood, not too far from the National Zoo.

Um, so if you come visit the zoo, you could go see Ana Montes' old home. But we spent a lot of time carefully, meticulously going through. We found her laptop computer under her bed the very first time we got into her apartment, and that was critical because we could prove that the Cubans had tasked her to purchase that exact computer.

The irony is the computer should have been thrown in the bottom of the Potomac River, and if it had been, you're sitting down talking to somebody else today because she never would have went to prison. 

Sasha Ingber: What did you find on it, and why do you think she hadn't thrown it out when she seemed to have been very careful?

Peter Lapp: She was incredibly careful. She thought that everything on that computer was deleted. The Cubans gave her, as part of her covert communication plan and system, they gave her a, a, uh, decryption, encryption software, and then they also gave her a wipe software. Whether she didn't apply the wipe software correctly or the Cubans, their software wasn't very good, I don't know, but there was 11 pages of Spanish text from her to the Cubans and from the Cubans to her, and in that, we found the conspiracy to commit espionage.

We found national defense information. We found classified information. We found a special access program that belonged to the National Reconnaissance Office, the NRO, that operates all the spy satellites. And I call it the four sentences. Those four sentences, um, could have been death penalty eligible evidence 

Sasha Ingber: That is a very classified program that she got access to 

Peter Lapp: To this day.

To this day. Yeah, she 

Sasha Ingber: was- Still hurting the NRO 

Peter Lapp: Yeah, she was read into the program, and just the telling, her telling the Cubans of the existence of the program was potentially death penalty eligible type evidence. 

Sasha Ingber: Now we're talking specifically about the Directorate of Intelligence, the DI. They received training from the KGB.

How did the service evolve after the fall of the Soviet Union, and are there aspects of Cuban tradecraft that other countries have copied? 

Peter Lapp: The Cubans did get a leg up with the relationship they had with the Soviet Union and KGB. I think they've gone well beyond that, partially because, you know, the FBI does the counterintelligence for the United States in the United States as the lead.

The Cuban Intelligence Service conducts counterintelligence on the island of Cuba against its own citizens like no other, and isn't restricted by the privacy and the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment that the United States has, that the FBI has to. So gets a lot of practice doing counterintelligence and intelligence against its own people, and in my opinion, it's what's helped the regime stay in power for now almost 70 years or so.

They do intelligence like no one else, off the island in, in the United States, and also in Cuba as well. 

Sasha Ingber: Can you talk to me about some of the defectors that you interviewed in the course of writing this book about Ana Montes? What did they tell you? 

Peter Lapp: So I had a chance to talk to three different defectors, only one of whom I'd actually talked to, um, previously as part of when I was at the FBI.

Fascinating stories, and, and really you get a, a good impression of… These were individuals that when they worked in Cuba for the Cuban intelligence services were treated very well as compared to your average Cuban, and these three individuals collectively just got, got really disgusted with the regime, the corruption within the Castro regime.

Fidel, the way he lived really started to disgust these individuals, and they started seeing through the veil of communism and the veil of, of, uh, you know, the regime and how that was so disgusting to them. So they started building grievances, and then little by little they would provide the US intelligence community with information that ultimately helped us, you know, with punching back against the Cubans in a number of cases, uh, one of them being obviously Montes.

Sasha Ingber: And one of them actually had the opportunity to kill Fidel Castro. He had been a security officer who was traveling with Castro. Can you talk about more of that moment and why he ultimately didn't and whether he regretted it? 

Peter Lapp: He was down that grievance road. He, he knew he was going to defect at some point in time.

He was, I believe he was already working with US intelligence, and the Cubans gave him a Smith & Wesson 45 caliber weapon to protect Fidel when Fidel went on a, uh, like a state visit to another country. He told me the story where Fidel had his entire bedroom shipped to this place that he was staying at so that he could get a good night's sleep.

His mattress, his sheets, the whole thing, and he was just disgusted with this. You know, your average Cuban is l- is living in poverty, and Fidel needed his own bed and his will be and his, like, nightgown and all that kind of stuff. He had close access to Fidel every night, and he made the decision not to kill him because he knew that it would be essentially a death sentence for him.

He told me, he said, "Nothing would've changed. The regime would've stayed in power," and, and, you know, history, history kind of proved him right. When Fidel retires and Raúl Castro takes over, nothing changed. So we say these things like, "Why doesn't someone near this person just kill them?" And it's like, it's...

There's a human being that would have to pull that trigger and potentially, you know, be a, a, a, a death sentence themselves. 

Sasha Ingber: Right. That's a sacrifice many would not be willing to make. 

Peter Lapp: Right. 

Sasha Ingber: When we come back, we look at Kendall Myers and Manuel Rocha, two other US government officials who spied for Cuba.

And what did they say about the Directorate of Intelligence in terms of putting together pieces of this picture of how Cuba's primary intelligence service operates? 

Peter Lapp: All of them told us that, you know, the United States is their top priority. So if you flip that around, for the United States, our top priority is China, you know, followed by Russian and then followed by pretty much everyone else, whereas Cuba, the United States is their top priority, so all of their resources are against the United States.

They focus on who makes the foreign policy for the US government, and those are their top priors. You know, folks like Ambassador Rocha, folks like Kendall Myers were technically actually a higher priority, 

Sasha Ingber: uh- And we're talking about the US ambassador to Bolivia- Right ... uh, Manuel Rocha, Kendall Myers, who worked at the State Department in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and both spied for Cuba.

Peter Lapp: Correct, correct. They would've been higher priorities for the Cuban Intelligence Service because their top priority is the White House, the Congress, and the State Department, the folks that make the foreign policy for the United States of America. So they gave us a lot of interesting information about where their priorities are, um, how they operate, you know, would they pay a source, or would they see that as, you know, being not really how their intelligence service operates?

I mean, they're very frugal, but they also are very leery of a source like Ana if they were to walk in and say, "I'll do this for a million dollars," like a Hanssen or an Aldrich Ames. They would be very leery of that. You've gotta have this visceral empathy with what Cuba's trying to accomplish. 

Sasha Ingber: So when we think about where we are today- 

Peter Lapp: Yeah

Sasha Ingber: um, in May, CIA Director John Ratcliffe goes to the island, and he actually meets with intelligence officials. What is the significance of that? 

Peter Lapp: So it's interesting. I was thinking about that because, you know, former Director of Central Intelligence Bill Burns, under the Biden administration, did a lot of diplomatic type meetings involving, uh, Ukraine and Russia.

So my sense is that, you know, with Secretary Rubio being a little busy with, you know, one of his two jobs- 

Um, it made sense that the administration would send, uh, Ratcliffe to, to, to, to have this meeting. We know that the relationship with Cuba and Venezuela between both the governments and the intelligence services was very strong.

So sending a strong message that we know the Cuban intelligence is very involved with the Cuban government sends a strong message to them. You know, I, I, I don't know if there's an intelligence message versus more of a diplomatic message, if you will, and I think that, uh, sending someone of that prominence m- sent a, a strong message probably to the Cubans that, you know, there's, there's a seriousness that this administration has with seeing, uh, change in Cuba.

Sasha Ingber: So essentially a warning. 

Peter Lapp: I would say a warning. Yeah, I would say a strong warning. And I think the other thing that was really interesting, the United States brought the head of the military part of the, the law enforcement mission in Venezuela that killed 32, I believe, Cuban military individuals who were supporting Venezuela, and they specifically introduced him as that guy who helped kill 32 of your people.

Another pretty strong message, if you will. 

Sasha Ingber: Now, who leads the Directorate of Intelligence now? 

Peter Lapp: They're very secretive about, you know, their leadership within the Cuban Intelligence Service. Although it's kind of funny, um, some of the individuals that I had seen or, um actually had investigations on in the past are on Facebook.

I honestly don't know a lot about the head of Cuban intelligence. I do know that it's a person of, of significant trust. I mean, they put a lot of trust into those positions. They're highly, highly trusted. 

Sasha Ingber: So with Cuba's weakened economy, with, uh, President Trump's oil blockade, with the economic sanctions, is Cuban intelligence still something to take very seriously today?

And has it changed their capabilities and priorities that they are suffering on another level, a deeper level because of Washington? 

Peter Lapp: Yeah, my, my complaint against multi administrations is that we put a lot of focus on China and Russia, and we've forgotten about Cuba. We don't appreciate, we don't respect it.

And Cuba is, has utilized that to fly under the radar, to be able to accomplish things from an intelligence perspective because there's not the same emphasis that the FBI, the CIA, the intelligence community has put against as compared to Russia and China. Is Cuba weakened currently? Yes. But does that mean that their intelligence service is weakened?

I, I would not say so. You know, I would think that- Folks that are cooperating currently within our government who have a dual loyalty, who are, you know, agents of the Cuban Intelligence Service, are probably ramping up what they're doing and trying to provide as much help as they can to Cuba, as they probably see, like Ana did, you know, this United States, this big country picking on this little island, you know, and probably see an imbalance of, uh, resources and, and, you know, m- magnitude and all that kind of stuff.

So I think that they're probably ramped up quite a bit right now from an intelligence perspective against our, our country. 

Sasha Ingber: So let's talk more about what that would look like you know, if we're talking retaliation or something else. And I think it's worth noting that, as you and I have discussed, the Cubans operate very strongly out of New York, where they have their diplomatic mission to the UN as well as Florida, where there is a large portion of their diaspora. 

Peter Lapp: Right. 

Sasha Ingber: So what does this look like to you? 

Peter Lapp: I have no doubt that our government, um, is still penetrated by the Cuban Intelligence Service. I, I can all but guarantee there are agents working for them amongst us. So I would say that those two places are probably still significant from an intelligence perspective.

Cuban intelligence services don't change over time very quickly. And, you know, I think back to Ana, where they were as high-tech as they were in that, in that age. I mean, it's been 25 years since she was arrested. And when the folks in Miami were arrested in 1998, instead of going to the next generation of covert communication, like let's go to the new stuff, they went backwards to basically using chalk and, and brush passes and, like, the old school intelligence stuff.

So I would say that that's probably still the way it is today. I doubt the Cuban Intelligence Service is using AI. You know? Okay. I, you know, maybe they're using deep fakes and all that kind of stuff that other folks are using, but I don't think they've reached to that next generation of technology and starting to use, you know, that as, as part of their handling.

They're just... They're kind of an old school intelligence service, and they, they know it's worked in the past, so they're comfortable with that versus, you know, the new stuff, if you will. That's my impression. 

Sasha Ingber: We saw this Axios article that said that there was intelligence that, uh, Cuba had hundreds of drones that could be launched at the United States, weaponized drones.

Peter Lapp: Yeah 

Sasha Ingber: Unlikely? 

Peter Lapp: You have to consider it as a possibility, but I just don't see them right now doing something... They're not dumb, and that would be an incredibly dumb act that this administration, I don't think, would, would just let go by. 

Sasha Ingber: What about the networks of illegals? I'm thinking about the WASP network 

Peter Lapp: Yeah

Sasha Ingber: in Miami that involved many Cuban spies who tried to infiltrate the US Southern Command headquarters. They were indicted in the '90s 

Peter Lapp: Yeah, I mean, their intelligence, their illegal program is phenomenal. Any country's illegal program is, is their crown jewel. 

Sasha Ingber: So what makes their program phenomenal?

Peter Lapp: It's kind of funny, you know, watching The Americans, right? That TV series was very realistic on the in- the illegal operations of, of many countries. The illegals are very difficult for the FBI to get onto. The illegals, they're, they're like ghosts because they blend in. They, they're next to their neighbor.

They maybe work as a janitor somewhere, but they have flexibility where they can come and do brush passes and have lunch meetings with Ana and, and clear dead drops and do all that kind of work. It's very difficult to uncover an illegal network. 

Sasha Ingber: And they, these are people who memorized, uh, fake life stories.

Peter Lapp: Yeah. 

Sasha Ingber: They took on separate jobs. They lived in meager ways, as far as I can understand. Can you say more about them? 

Peter Lapp: They're, um, intelligence officers who are here illegally. So there are intelligence officers who are here legally. Um, they're recognized by the State Department because they're assigned to the Cuban embassy or the Cuban mission to the UN, for example.

The illegals don't have diplomatic immunity. So the Wasp Network intelligence officers who were here illegally, who infiltrated through themselves and through agents, uh, the Cuban American community, um, spying on them and also spying on military bases down in South Florida, uh, areas that would have had oversight of some kind of invasion of Cuba if the president had ever said go.

So a critical network for Cuba in a very critical spot in, in South Florida. 

Sasha Ingber: If we continue on this idea of a potential response by the Cubans to what the United States has done, will do, Cuba also offers proximity to our adversaries- 

Peter Lapp: Yeah ... 

Sasha Ingber: namely China and Russia, and that is particularly important when it comes to SIGINT- signals intelligence. Uh, China has several listening stations on the island. The Russians have Lourdes, which is a complex that reportedly, according to The Insider, a publication, said is now a hub for Russian intelligence personnel again after having been used by the Soviets. Do you see the Cubans leveraging that somehow?

Peter Lapp: Oh, absolutely. They've always bartered intelligence. It's part of what has kept the regime in power for all these years. You know, they collected human intelligence through like a Montes. Um, they're helping with signals intelligence of other groups. Um, whether there's a, a quid pro quo of cash or oil or food or whatever, sometimes it's been influence because, you know, they want regional influence, but other reasons, too.

So yeah, I think, I think they're definitely, um, cooperating with those folks that are traditionally adversarial to the United States. It's just, it's just the way they've been for 70-plus years. 

Sasha Ingber: And the intelligence sharing between these three countries. 

Peter Lapp: Yeah. It's significant. You know, I, the, the, the National Reconnaissance Office Special Access Program that we talked about, that would've impacted Cuba a little bit from a defensive perspective.

Like, okay, if we could figure out where that satellite is, does that help us? Huge asset to China, Russia, Iran. So that was a chip they absolutely played and gave to other intelligence services. So they've always bartered intelligence and traded it and, and shared it with, you know, folks that are like-minded to them.

Sasha Ingber: What about the intelligence officers who were posted outside of the United States? We know that in years past they supported leftist movements What are your thoughts on what they could be doing today? 

Peter Lapp: Department M1 is the United States. M2 is Latin America. So shows to me that the Latin American region is their second top priority.

I would argue that they're probably spending a lot of time in Latin America working with, uh, leftist governments, trying to keep them propped up and keep them supporting them. I mean, could they be recruiting Americans that are, um, assigned, you know, stationed in Latin America with the State Department that possibly they could be targeting?

But my thinking is that they're probably more aligned with helping them and their government stay afloat to keep, um, that part of their, their government, the leftist part of the government in power, if you will. 

Sasha Ingber: Would they have the resources to do that right now with the blockade? 

Peter Lapp: Uh, it would be limited.

There is a finite... Any intelligence service has a finite amount of resources, and, um, you know, Cuba's no different. There's a limited amount of resources that they have to spend time in Latin America and, and really be productive, you know, to, to be honest with you. I think the United States is their top priority still, and I'm sure that they're putting the v- vast majority of their resources against us.

Sasha Ingber: What would the tertiary priority be if US is number one, Latin America is two? 

Peter Lapp: I mean, they, they targeted... One of the defectors I talked to, he targeted industrial information, trade secrets that belonged to whoever. The United States, yes, but other countries, Germany, and he was active in trying to steal trade secrets to provide that back to Cuban industry or that Cuba could provide to other countries to see if they could, uh, commercialize and, and, and make something out of it.

They, they were absolutely very focused on industrial espionage as well. 

Sasha Ingber: Taking a cue from the Chinese there. 

Peter Lapp: Well, I would say the Chinese maybe took a cue from them, to be honest with you, because they, they were doing these types of operations as far back as the '80s, and I don't know that China was really that advanced at that point in time in targeting trade secrets.

I feel like that came a little bit later. Now, again, I don't know if they learned from the Cubans or they organically developed this capability, but, uh, you know, Cuba just didn't target American classified information. They also targeted trade secrets. 

Sasha Ingber: And another prominent spy beyond Ana Montes was Kendall Myers.

He just passed away in prison in May. He came from an incredibly elite family, uh, with Alexander Graham Bell, who had invented the telephone, and, uh, Gilbert Grosvenor, who's the editor of National Geographic. And from a previous SpyCast interview from someone who had been involved in that investigation, I learned that he'd even been approached by the East German Stasi and chose to spy for Cuba instead, doing this at the State Department in their intelligence and research unit.

Is there more that you can share about Myers from your perspective? 

Peter Lapp: It was a really invest- interesting investigation. I had a, a small role in it. I actually handed the case off to an agent who inherited it when it was an unsub case. We were trying to figure out who he was. Um, there was medical information that was part of our intelligence.

Like, we knew that the person's partner had a tumor. Um, Kendall's a really interesting individual because when he's arrested, he's brought into a hotel room where I'm sitting there. And, um, I said, "Hi, I'm Pete. I was part of the team that arrested Ana. I know everything about you. So your time right now is limited because if you have actionable intelligence. Your value to us and to you ends when you make your first appearance, which is gonna be in about two hours in front of a judge, 'cause then the media's gonna be there and they'll find out about it. Now's your chance." 

And he said, "I don't have... If I had anything actionable, I would give it to you." So it showed to me that he had a desire to help himself out in the moment, you know, having his worst moment ever, um, but didn't have any information that, that could help him. That operation was really, really fascinating to watch because they did what's called a false flag, where we, we had a Cuban walk up to him on his birthday outside of the school he was teaching at, SAIS, 

Sasha Ingber: at- At Johns Hopkins- 

Peter Lapp: Johns 

Sasha Ingber: Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. 

Peter Lapp: Yeah, here in DC. Uh, used to be on Massachusetts Avenue, and he was walking out of class and a, an undercover Cuban handed him a Cuban cigar on his birthday and said, "On behalf of your friends, we wanna wish you a happy birthday, and we'd like to talk." And he was like, "Oh," 'cause he hadn't been in touch with them in years.

He called his wife and said, "We have a meeting." And she said, "Is it mandatory?" And he said, "Yes." 

Sasha Ingber: Right. He supposedly told this undercover FBI agent, "We've really missed you." And I mean, he even went on to say that, uh, you know, "The Cubans have been a really important part of our lives." Yeah. And quote, "We have felt incomplete."

Did you really believe that he didn't have anything he could share? Because it sounds like- I did ... he was deeply, deeply loyal to them. 

Peter Lapp: Yeah, I did, but, but he's thinking of his wife in that moment. Her health had been an issue. But it shows, and I like to say this about the Cubans, because I think compared to the Russians, who find kind of slimy individuals. People are just in it for the money. Cubans find people that have a higher moral calling. I mean, they're committing the same crime. They're both committing espionage, but they're doing it for what they see as moral reasons. I'm not justifying it, but I'm saying that they at least had a belief that what they're doing is right.

I wouldn't say Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames ever thought that what they were doing was right. They were getting paid money by the Russians. So I think that, you know, that reaction to us when we kinda cold call them, obviously we weren't really us. We, we've, we were, you know, disguising who we were to a degree, but they did miss that part of their life and that part of helping and being a part of that visceral empathy for what Cuba in their mind stands for.

Like, well, if you support the regime, you then also have to support how they oppress their people, how they, they, they oppress the freedom of speech and religion, of all these other things that we take for granted, Mr. Descendant of the Bell Telephone. You know, you're living well, and you can, you have this freedom of speech, and you're supporting people that don't allow their own people To, to protest and, and do the things that you can do.

It's just that dichotomy is just really hard to grasp for me. 

Sasha Ingber: So when we think about the fact that the Cubans are good at recruiting on that, uh, sort of idealistic- 

Peter Lapp: Yeah ... 

Sasha Ingber: level where you may believe that you're supporting these people who have been so repressed by the evil United States, do you think that they might be trying to leverage, um, animosity that some people hold toward the Trump administration, which certainly has its critics?

Peter Lapp: Absolutely. I, I, you know, you go back to MICE, money, ideology, coercion, ego. There's... They've added the R for revenge. Um, Ana is often seen as an ideological spy. I think she's more of a revenge, and her attitude was, "How dare the United States dictate how Cuba should run itself? That's up to the Cuban people."

Sasha Ingber: In keeping in line with whether or not Cuban intelligence would try to somehow contort feelings on the Trump administration and its policies toward Cuba, can we also talk about former career diplomat and US ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha, who had spied for Cuba for about 40 years? As part of his cover, he purported to be this, quote-unquote, right-wing person.

Mm-hmm. Uh, he spoke highly of President Trump. How does that play into this? 

Peter Lapp: I think, uh, deception, you know, providing a cover that would make people, if they suspected him, maybe be skeptical. Like, how could he be working with the Cubans if he's so, you know, staunch Republican, staunch, you know, right-wing kind of, uh, anti-Castro kind of person?

I think it was probably just more of a dis- uh, deception, frankly, covering for what he was really doing and what his real beliefs were. 

Sasha Ingber: And interesting that that would be his choice- 

Peter Lapp: Yeah 

Sasha Ingber:  - to, to make it seem like he was in line with the Trump administration. Earlier in this conversation, you had referred to three Cuban defectors.

Can you talk more about who they were and what they shared with you in terms of exposing spies here in the United States, and how much the Cubans really have to worry about infiltration? 

Peter Lapp: Well, just like we have to worry about, you know, folks that are the insider threat that are cooperating with Cuba, they have to worry too.

Frankly, you know, going back to that meeting between Ratcliffe and, and his, you know, peer in the Cuban intelligence service, one of my big wonders is whether the administration will say, "In order for there to be regime change, we need this, and also, we'd like the CIA and the FBI to come into your file room and take a look around and, and, uh, see who's been working for you within us."

Sasha Ingber: Wouldn't they have to be crazy to say yes? 

Peter Lapp: Well, you know, it depends on, you know, part of the what's on the table, what, you know, in terms of the whole bigger picture of diplomatic, you know, negotiations. There's precedent in history for that kind of activity, and that's where I would say if you're currently working with Cuban intelligence in our government, I would not consider yourself safe, frankly, because would I put it past the Cubans to provide your names as part of this diplomatic thing that's going on right now?

No, I wouldn't. You know, when... They're at a point of, of trying to just survive. What the Cubans do need to worry about, you know, even though their intelligence officers in Havana are well-treated, they're all going through blackouts and oil issues and food issues. I mean, the economy and what's going on in Cuba, sure, the regime and those that are supporting it are protected to a degree.

I have no doubt they're making some, some comfort of living type sacrifices, and the more they become disgruntled- The more the possibility is that they start working with US intelligence. 

Sasha Ingber: And can you talk about the defectors who had their own fascinating stories? 

Peter Lapp: Yeah. We should look at them as American heroes.

They really are heroes, and the Cubans look at them as traitors. Two of the three escaped on a raft, uh, a dinghy, not even a raft. I mean, had a, uh, seven and a half horsepower outboard engine. Five gallons of water, five gallons of gas, and they didn't need the gas because about two hours into their escape, the engine stopped working, and they literally just drifted in the Florida Straits, dodging Cuban Coast Guard boats.

They actually saw an American Coast Guard boat, but they couldn't wave and get their attention, and they were finally rescued by American fishermen out of Marathon Key, Florida. And hey've been living free and, free and helpful lives ever since. But these guys are really American heroes. You'll never know their name.

You'll never know w- w- who they, who they truly are, but they've provided so much help to the FBI and the intelligence community.

Sasha Ingber: And a harrowing journey, to be sure 

What about the third guy?

Peter Lapp: Um, well, third guy was in, was in Russia. He comes back from Russia, and his buddies are gone, and that's when he- they had his oh, oh crap moment.

Um, the Cubans eventually, uh, arrested him and convicted him of espionage and sentenced him to life. His father had been a high-ranking Cuban intelligence officer, which is why I think they spared him his life. That guy was, uh, exchanged in 2014 when, uh, during a spy swap during the Obama administration.

Sasha Ingber: These defectors have provided valuable intelligence on Cuba, but what questions do you still have? 

Peter Lapp: Who's currently committing espionage in our government for Cuba? I mean, it's a $64,000 question.

Who is currently still in place, potentially damaging our national security? And that's a question only a select few within the Cuban Intelligence Service can answer. Even today, even though I'm retired now for six years, I'd love to know who's currently in our government, who's not loyal to us, but loyal to Cuba.

Sasha Ingber: Pete, thank you so much for your time. 

Peter Lapp: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. 

Sasha Ingber: Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. If you like the episode, give us a follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a rating or review. It really helps. If you have any feedback or you wanna hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycast@spymuseum.org.

I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and this show is brought to you by N2K Networks, Goat Rodeo, and the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.