Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  Cuba’s intelligence service, according to former officers who have defected, is especially active at universities near its diplomatic missions in New York and Washington, which have the usual complement of spies, and in South Florida, the epicenter of the exile community. Such schools include Harvard, Yale, Columbia, New York University, Hunter College, American University, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, the University of Miami, and Florida International University. Cuban intelligence tracks all of the publicly available information on these universities, from their undergraduate and graduate programs to the views and publications of administrators and faculty members.

  When it identifies a sympathetic professor, it enlists a Cuban academic in the same field to strike up a friendship, which ripens through meetings and meals at conferences, “and even invitations to visit Cuba,” the FBI reported. A department of Cuban intelligence arranges academic travel to Cuba and monitors the visitors’ rooms in government-run hotels, hoping for compromising videos or recordings.

  “I learned blackmail at the Russian academy,” said García, whom Cuba sent to study at KGB schools near Moscow in 1980 and 1985. When I asked how he would reel in a married professor who was caught with a woman in his hotel room while attending a conference in Havana, he gave a knowing look and said he would prefer a subtle approach. “Just showing knowledge. ‘How was your night with the lady? We can help you, protect you, nobody will never know.’”

  When Harvard professor Jorge Domínguez visited Havana to research a book on Cuban foreign policy in 1985–86, Cuban intelligence seized its chance to pump him. After he interviewed Cuban officials, Domínguez recalled in June 2016, they asked to interview him in return. He agreed. As they pressed him for names and personal information of influential Cuban-Americans in Florida, he realized that, despite titles from other government branches, they belonged to the intelligence service. He told them that they had the wrong guy; all he knew about the Florida scene was what he read in the newspapers.

  Cuban-American professors at U.S. universities are trapped in the middle of a spy war. Intelligence services in both countries zero in on them. Much as it pressured a Chinese-American professor, Dajin Peng, to spy on his homeland, the FBI asked one Cuban-American professor to persuade a friend of his in the Cuban government to defect to the United States. He consulted an administrator at his university, who told him, “You go to Cuba as an academic, not as an intelligence agent.” The professor declined the FBI’s request.

  * * *

  ALMOST EVERY LAWYER in Puerto Rico knew Miguel Velázquez Rivera, whom they called “Don Miguel” as a token of respect. Not only was he a prominent judge noted for his influential opinions, and later a University of Puerto Rico School of Law professor so admired that a moot court competition is named after him, but he also ran a popular—and lucrative—side business preparing students for the Puerto Rican bar exam. Striding around the auditorium that he leased from the school, he would pepper his pupils with questions and regale them with tales of a fictional family whose disputes and misfortunes illuminated the fine points of the law.

  “His cast of characters are legendary in local law,” says attorney Charles Hey-Maestre, who credits the course with helping him pass the exam. “They were always having problems. He’d say, ‘Juan Péres López and his wife are getting a divorce. Their child is going to college. What does the law say about paying support?’ Giving a hypothetical example made it more fun.” The study guides that he sold to accompany the course featured the same characters, along with actual cases and statutes.

  Don Miguel’s life embodied the American dream of upward mobility. Of mixed race, with dark skin and blue eyes, he rose from a poor childhood in the town of Moca to own a large San Juan home shielded from urban bustle by a bevy of trees, bushes, and flowers. His slender, long-haired wife, Dominga Hernandez, painted at an easel in the back of the house; her colorful art was once exhibited in the Puerto Rican Bar Association building. They sent their eight children, two daughters and six sons, to a Catholic high school in San Juan and then to fine universities in the continental United States, including Princeton, Stanford, and Carleton College. The eldest, Teresa, now a pediatrician in Virginia, was encouraged as a child “to read, learn, work hard, be patient and stay healthy and happy,” according to the website of her medical practice.

  Despite his success and affluence, Don Miguel wasn’t satisfied with the status quo. He made no secret of his support for the independence of Puerto Rico, which was invaded by the United States in 1898. He was in a distinct minority; only about 5 percent of Puerto Rican voters have backed independence in referenda over the years. Many more of them sympathize with nationalist aspirations but fear that Puerto Rico couldn’t sustain itself economically as a separate country.

  His pro-independence stance may have hampered his career advancement, but Don Miguel thought there was another reason why he never achieved his ambition of serving on the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico. The island’s white, old-boy network, he believed, passed him over because of his color.

  “He was convinced that, were it not for his race, he would have been named to the Supreme Court,” said Professor José Julian Alvarez, who was his student and law school colleague. “He always resented that. It was something that really pissed him off.”

  Don Miguel was especially close to his younger daughter, Marta, who was born in July 1957. “He was the motivator, he encouraged her to excel,” said another law school professor, Roberto Aponte Toro, who also served as dean from 2007 to 2011. “She was very involved with him. He was an excellent father. She was an excellent student and an excellent daughter.” Marta revered Don Miguel and inherited his devotion to independence and racial equality. Both causes likely spurred her interest in another Caribbean island: Cuba.

  Puerto Rico and Cuba have many historical and cultural affinities. They were the last two Spanish colonies in the Western Hemisphere, and their economies both depended on sugarcane. José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban patriot and revolutionary, envisioned both islands in an independent confederation. A poem that many Puerto Rican children read in school describes them as “two wings of the same bird,” an image that Cuban folksinger Pablo Milanés borrowed in his “Son de Cuba a Puerto Rico.”

  The Castro regime, which took power when Marta was a toddler, would have appealed to a young, mixed-race Puerto Rican independentista. Fidel Castro touted progress in race relations that appeared to contrast with continuing discrimination in the United States. Politically, he defied the behemoth to the north, insisting on Cuba’s right to shape its destiny. He sought the same right for Puerto Rico. Cuba financed its independence movement, advocated for its self-determination before the United Nations decolonization committee, and established a house in Havana—Casa Puerto Rico—for visiting members of the independence movement.

  Aside from the merits of the issue, pushing Puerto Rican independence served two purposes for Castro. It irritated the U.S. government, and it attracted Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens by birth, to spy for Cuba on their homeland. “Cuba was working very hard that topic of the independence of Puerto Rico against the U.S. and it was an objective to recruit Puerto Ricans in any part of the world,” former Cuban intelligence officer Orlando Brito Pestana told me.

  Said García: “Cuba used Puerto Rico like a special support group to infiltrate agents inside the U.S., because they are Americans and have U.S. documents.”

  * * *

  TERESA VELÁZQUEZ ENROLLED at Princeton in 1972, and her sister, Marta, followed three years later. They joined a small contingent of students of Puerto Rican heritage that also included Sonia Sotomayor, now a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Sotomayor was Teresa’s friend and classmate, and a mentor to younger Hispanic students, so it’s likely that she knew Marta as well.

  While Teresa was a pre-med biology major, Marta majored in politics—both in and out of the classroom. Rarely did she miss a student rally on behalf of women, minorities, and other targets of dis
crimination. She protested against the university’s investments in apartheid South Africa, chanting, “Princeton, divest, like all the rest / ’Cause if you don’t, we will not rest / We’re gonna fight and fight and keep on fighting some more / Princeton divest…” and petitioning the administration to “commit itself immediately to the complete divestiture of its securities in these institutions.” She organized a Latino Festival proclaiming “Independence and Socialism as the Only Political Alternative for Puerto Rico,” and a Third World Cultural Festival featuring Puerto Rican poetry, African dance, a Chinese folk song, a Chicano singing group, and a Native American exhibition.

  “We are all part of oppressed nationalities throughout the world,” Velázquez told the Daily Princetonian. “Here at the university, which is very conservative and white-male-oriented, if we can put together a performance as successful as this one was, it’s almost unbelievable.”

  Velázquez occasionally took a break from politics. She enjoyed dancing, movies, and weekends in Manhattan, making the rounds of restaurants and clubs. Still, she was a young woman of deep convictions, even on mundane matters, as her college friends recall. “What I remember about Marty is just her intensity,” said Nilsa Santiago, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “When she spoke, it’s like the words vibrated through her whole body. Her head, her neck, her torso would move in time with the earnestness of her words.

  “She was very idealistic, very earnest about whatever she was talking to you about. She really, really believed it, and she wanted you to believe it. If she said something that she thought you would know but you weren’t familiar with, a quizzical look of disbelief would register on her face.”

  One afternoon, as they were walking into the student center, Velázquez said to Santiago, “Let’s have yogurt.”

  “I’ve never had yogurt,” Santiago replied.

  “What? This is unbelievable,” Velázquez said. She marched Santiago into the cafeteria and selected a Dannon blueberry yogurt. “She remedied my ignorance and I now had a new favorite snack,” Santiago recalled.

  For her senior thesis, Velázquez chose a topic close to her—and her father’s—heart. Describing herself as “the descendant of an African woman who lived in a sugar plantation on the sister island Puerto Rico,” she explored “Race Relations in Cuba: Past and New Developments.” Starting with a long quotation from Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, a communist and Castro supporter, she recounted Cuba’s history of slavery and racial discrimination, finding that it was crueler, and aroused fiercer resistance among black Africans on the island, than was generally thought. The United States, she wrote, “continued this oppression by allying itself with the Cuban oligarchy,” and with former Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, who, while mixed-race himself, was “the defender of a powerful racist class.”

  She had nothing but praise for the revolutionary who overthrew Batista: Castro. “The government has instituted an informal but well understood policy of de-emphasizing any racial differences,” she wrote. “They have gone about this, however, in a unique form. Instead of trying to assimilate the black population into the European culture of the dominant society, the government has pointed at the common African heritage of all the Cuban people.… The new Cuba is not only latin, but latino-african in its political and social identity.

  “This has perhaps proved to be the wisest course ever taken by a Cuban leader.… When compared to the situation of absolute rejection and powerlessness felt by blacks and mulattoes before the 1959 revolution, the new state is indeed a blessing.”

  President Carter had lifted restrictions on travel to Cuba, and Velázquez, joining a trip sponsored by Princeton’s Latin American Studies program, conducted “a brief period of field research” there for her thesis. The highlight of her visit, according to a college friend, was an unscheduled exposure to the Yoruba culture that West African slaves brought to Cuba. She attended and recorded a concert of Afro-Cuban jazz.

  “She had gotten to go to this unauthorized, underground Yoruba gathering in Cuba,” the friend recalled. “Black people in Cuba kept this culture alive. She was able to see it for herself.” Back at Princeton, she played the tape for her friend: “She seemed to think it was relevant, or exciting,” he said.

  It’s not clear how she gained access to the jam session. Perhaps Cuban authorities gave permission because the African-influenced music pertained to her thesis topic. If so, her request may have drawn the attention of Cuban intelligence. Or they may have noticed her anyway. Exceptionally bright, dedicated to Puerto Rican independence, and sympathetic to the Castro regime, with an Ivy League education as a gateway to an influential position in U.S. government or academia, she was an ideal candidate for recruitment.

  * * *

  LOCATED IN WASHINGTON, D.C., near Dupont Circle, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies has spawned an impressive roster of U.S. diplomats and cabinet members, including former secretary of the treasury Timothy Geithner, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and former U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie. Its pipeline to power invites attention from foreign intelligence services, including Cuba’s.

  “SAIS was always one of the most important universities, because of its access to the U.S. government,” said Pestana, the former Cuban intelligence officer. Officials at the Cuban Interest Section, Cuba’s diplomatic outpost in Washington, “always had that as a priority.”

  Cuba succeeded in penetrating the school, which offers master’s degrees in fields such as international affairs, international economics, and global policy. In the early 1980s, at least three people at SAIS were in contact with Cuban intelligence. All would spy for Cuba while working for the U.S. government, according to court documents. One was a professor, Kendall Myers. Two were students: Marta Rita Velázquez and Ana Belén Montes.

  Velázquez and Montes had so much in common that they seemed destined to be friends, even if one wasn’t recruiting the other for espionage. Montes was born in 1957, four months before Velázquez, on a military base in West Germany where her father, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, was stationed. Like Don Miguel Velázquez, who favored Puerto Rican independence, Alberto Montes took an interest in the island’s political future, though his views are in dispute. He “strongly supported” independence and “voiced that opinion freely in letters and articles,” according to former Defense Intelligence Agency investigator Scott Carmichael.

  Shortly before his death in 2000, Alberto wrote a paper advocating independence for Puerto Rico, in connection with a United Nations hearing, Ana’s mother, Emilia Montes, told me in a phone conversation. Another relative, though, believes that Alberto “had very moderate views and thought it was best for PR to remain a commonwealth.”

  The family eventually settled in Towson, Maryland, a Baltimore suburb, where Montes attended high school. Both Velázquez and Montes studied Latin American politics at prestigious universities—in Montes’s case, the University of Virginia—and graduated in 1979. Both enrolled at SAIS three years later. In the interim, Velázquez earned a law degree at Georgetown University, where she edited a journal on immigration law. While attending SAIS, both had jobs in the federal government. Montes worked full-time at the U.S. Department of Justice, handling public records requests, and Velázquez was a legal intern at the State Department’s Agency for International Development.

  Montes brought Velázquez to her parents’ home in Maryland on several occasions, said a relative who requested anonymity. “They seemed to be best friends.” Velázquez was “sweet, warm, and friendly. We all liked her.”

  “They were good friends,” Emilia Montes said. “Marta seemed to be a nice girl, very social and smart and clever.”

  Both classmates opposed the Reagan administration’s policy in Latin America, and especially Nicaragua, where a proxy war was raging between Cuba and the United States. They favored the Cuba-backed Sandinista government, which had overthrown dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, and wer
e appalled by U.S. efforts to topple the Sandinistas by funneling arms and money to a rebel group known as the Contras.

  SAIS was a magnet for debate over U.S. policy. Wayne Smith, a career diplomat who favored rapprochement with the Castro regime, quit as head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana in 1982 in disagreement with the administration’s hard-line stance. In the spring of 1984, Montes’s and Velázquez’s second year, Smith taught a course at SAIS on Cuban history since the 1959 revolution.

  Montes “gained her first real insight into what she described as the cruel and inhumane nature of U.S. Government policy supporting the Contra rebels in Nicaragua during her graduate studies at Johns Hopkins,” the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General reported in 2005. “Most of the other students and professors at Johns Hopkins shared her views about the unjustness of U.S. policies.”

  Montes clashed with one of her professors, Riordan Roett, who taught an introductory course on Latin American politics. “She disliked me and my staff completely, and thought we were fascists,” Roett told me. “Every time I said something that was pro-America, prodemocracy, pro-NATO, she would protest.”

  Montes and Velázquez gravitated toward a more like-minded professor, Piero Gleijeses, who taught “U.S. Relations with Latin America” in 1982–83, and “The United States and Central America” in fall 1983. The Italian-born Gleijeses, who told me that he was “the most left-wing” professor at SAIS, rejected an overture from the CIA in 1983. A woman visited his office and “made a little pitch.… She said, at the time I was writing a fair amount about Central America, perhaps I had information. This would help the United States develop policy. I said I was not interested. There was absolutely no insistence, absolutely no pressure.”