A Visa for Castro's Terrorism Chief

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 18, 1999 | by J. Michael Waller

As President Clinton granted clemency to the Puerto Rican Terrorists, the White House was pushing to allow Fidel's terrorism coordinator to set up shop in Washington.

A mysterious White House push to allow one of Fidel Castro's top covert operatives to set up shop in Washington adds a new twist to the deepening controversy about President Clinton's August decision to free members of two Cuban-backed Puerto Rican terrorist groups.

Insight has learned that while the White House prepared to grant clemency to 16 imprisoned terrorists, it pressured the State Department to grant a visa to Fernando Garcia Bielsa, a high-ranking Cuban Communist Party official in charge of supporting the very terrorist groups to which the prisoners belonged. The visa would allow Garcia Bielsa to work under diplomatic cover at the Cuban Interests Section on 16th Street in Washington, just blocks from the White House.

Garcia Bielsa is not a typical gray apparatchik. As chief of the America Department of the Cuban Communist Party Central Committee, he is responsible for the party's covert operations -- including agent-of-influence activity and support for Puerto Rican terrorism against the United States.

The America Department, known by its Spanish initials DA, long has been Castro's main instrument for coordinating terrorism in the Western Hemisphere. A 1975 Senate investigation on Cuban support for terrorism found that the DA began directing terrorist operations in Puerto Rico and in the Midwestern and Eastern United States in 1974. Senate hearings in 1982 revealed that Cuban intelligence "organized" the Puerto Rican Armed Forces of National Liberation, known by its Spanish acronym, FALN. The terrorists Clinton recently freed belonged to the FALN and a related group, the Boricua Popular Army-Macheteros, or the Macheteros.

A 1981 State Department report says the DA was created "to centralize Cuban control over covert activities" in support of revolutionary groups in the hemisphere. Castro's KGB-like state intelligence service, the General Intelligence Directorate, or DGI, is a separate organization also used for terrorist support.

Under U.S. law, State cannot independently issue visas to foreigners believed to be entering the country for the purpose of hostile intelligence activity. The Immigration and Nationality Act requires that such cases also must have the approval of the attorney general. And Attorney General Janet Reno -- a native of Miami with years of knowledge of how the Cuban regime works -- has not rushed her decision. But officials opposed to Garcia Bielsa's visa are concerned that Reno will cave in. A Justice spokeswoman, Kara Peterman, told Insight at press time that she had no information on the issue.

Before the Clinton administration took the reins of the federal government, the Cuban Interests Section contained 24 staff, nearly all of whom were intelligence agents, according to a Cuban-American National Foundation study by Rex A. Hudson. Today, the espionage presence there is nearly double that number, according to a congressional source, while U.S. intelligence presence at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana is "meager" by comparison.

An intelligence source tells Insight that Garcia Bielsa personally oversaw the funding and direction of the Macheteros, a clandestine militant organization that seeks to convert Puerto Rico into an independent, Marxist-Leninist state. Machetero members offered clemency were serving time in connection with the 1983 armed robbery of a Wells Fargo armored truck in Connecticut to finance their terrorist activity.

A 1988 federal report on terrorism signed by then-vice president George Bush, who headed the Task Force on Combating Terrorism, termed the Macheteros "a tightly controlled and extremely violent Puerto Rican terrorist group that has targeted primarily U.S. military personnel and Puerto Rican police.... The stated position of the group is that they have `declared war' on the United States."

One of the Machetero members involved in the Wells Fargo robbery, Victor Manuel Gerena, remains on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. A U.S. Information Agency international crime alert says Gerena "escaped to Cuba."

Cuba also continues to provide asylum to FALN fugitives, including bomber William Morales, who escaped in 1979 while serving a 99-year sentence for bombing and murder, fled to Mexico where he killed a policeman and was granted asylum by the Castro government. Clinton granted clemency to Morales' common-law wife, Dylcia Noemi Pagan, who was serving time for illegal weapons possession and seditious conspiracy.

After Machetero-attributed bombings rocked Puerto Rico in connection with radical protests against privatization of the telephone company in 1998, Garcia Bielsa flew to the island to meet with Machetero leaders and order them to desist. "He appears to have directly intervened to stop recent violent actions committed by the Macheteros in Puerto Rico," according to a U.S. government source. "After that meeting, the violence abruptly ceased."