News - 06-29-06_1
THE RETURN OF FIDEL CASTRO
Carlos the Jackal he called himself. He and the Argentine-born Ernesto “Che” Guevara are the best-known icons of the violent Left, as evidenced by the ubiquitous posters of Che, the guerilla fighter still glaring down today from dorm room walls and radical pads worldwide. Carlos, real name Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (his parents had a thing for the Russian Bolsheviks), now serving a life sentence in a Paris jail since the early ’90s, was mentioned in dispatches just recently by none other than Hugo Chavez, the socialist leader of Venezuela, Carlos’ nation of birth.
Che, killed in 1967 in Bolivia by agents provocateur, probably an American covert team, served under Castro and his brother Raul in the take-over of Cuba in 1959. He became a martyr to the communist cause, thus ensuring his enduring appeal to revolutionists everywhere. Carlos, however, was more of a global freelance assassin than a hemispheric revolutionary though he was consistently identified with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and other Middle Eastern terror groups and strong men. Carlos was remembered fondly by President Chavez recently for his attack on a meeting of OPEC in Vienna in the 1970s. The Jackal killed three and held the oil ministers hostage for a jet plane home.
The link between Carlos and Che was the Soviet Union. Their agents fomented revolution in Latin America and funded and protected Castro’s Cuba until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. As for Carlos, it is now known—through revelations by the former chief of the Romanian secret service Ion Pacepa—that Yasir Arafat, the leader of the PLO, Carlos’ main employer, was a KGB agent.
These personalities should be old news, but they are not, due to the re-emergence of Fidel Castro on the world stage in the last few months. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Castro turns 80 in August, a rather advanced age to be on the prowl, as if it were 1959 all over again. But there he is, on Fox and CNN, attacking his old nemesis the United States for the killing of Muslim terrorists, calling the acts “barbaric” and hinting he is in cahoots with Islamic jihadists, creating the potential for Cuba to become a staging ground for terror raids into the US. Perhaps the recent arrest of seven Islamoterrorists in Miami will make the point.
All this blustering by Castro comes at a time when the aging Maximum Leader of Cuba was already appearing on the geo-political radar screen as policy planners began speculating what would happen to Cuba “after Fidel.” This is the next big thing in American policy planning, ranking just under the Iraq war and nuclear saber-rattling by Iran and North Korea. And the issue of Castro and Cuba brings forth a flood of emotion as Cuban-Americans, contemplating taking Cuba back, and active and retired CIA officers look for an outlet to vent their rage and angst that Castro got away from them and humiliated the US by becoming a Soviet puppet state only 90 miles away from the American mainland.
Castro used to be more than a regional threat. It is now known from previously secret archives that Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev approved a plan in 1961 clearing the path for the KGB to appoint Castro to organize the Non-Aligned Movement to engage in political warfare against the US. The concept was to recruit newly emerging nations, many created during the gradual end of colonialism after World War II, into the Soviet sphere to gain world hegemony at the expense of America and the West.
In the second installment of the Mitrokhin Archive by Cambridge intelligence expert Chris Andrew (the keynote speaker at the first Raleigh International Spy Conference in 2003), Castro is quoted addressing the Fourth Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement held in Algiers in 1973: “Only the closest alliance among all the progressive forces of the world will provide us with the strength to overcome the still-powerful forces of imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism and racism, and to wage a successful fight for the aspirations to peace and justice of all the peoples of the world.” Castro was much more than a bad neighbor, he was financed by the Soviets to organize the world against the US and the West. And he put the KGB money where his mouth was by sending Cuban troops to 24 countries—in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America.
It appears all roads to political treachery in the modern era led to Moscow, and many times to Castro. From the ill-fated Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis—the closest the world came to nuclear war—through assassination plots, incessant espionage, torture and murder, you would think Castro, especially after the collapse of his piggy-bank, the Soviet Union, would simply grow old and die. Instead, like a summer re-run on television, the old warrior is back, financed by the oil money of his protg Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
So the timing could not be better for the Fourth Raleigh International Spy Conference, “Castro and Cuba: What Next,” set for August 23-25, 2006, presented by Metro Magazine and the NC Museum of History. Not only is the world asking what happens “after Fidel,” it wants to know if Castro is undertaking a communist revolution in South America in partnership with Venezuela.
Go to www.raleighspyconference.com or call 919-807-7917 for more information and to register for this informative and important event. And take note of the ad in this issue listing the expert speakers coming to Raleigh to talk about Castro and Cuba.