Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  While Alvarez hardly damaged U.S. national security, his exposure did tarnish the credibility of academia. It prompted Florida to ban using public funds for educational travel to Cuba, and widened the breach between the state’s Cuban exiles and Florida International.

  “The case affected us all at FIU,” Sebastián Arcos, associate director of its Cuban Research Institute, told me. “There was a lot of suspicion in the Cuban-American community that universities were full of pinkos who can’t be trusted. The community said, ‘Ha, told you so.’”

  It also reverberated at prestigious Harvard University. Using tactics common to both higher education and espionage, Alvarez had cultivated Professor Herbert Kelman, founding director of Harvard’s Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution, at conferences in the United States and Spain. “It was clear he had read my work, was familiar with the principles and concepts, and was eager to apply it to Cuba,” Kelman recalled.

  The flattery worked. In 1997, Alvarez became an affiliate of Kelman’s program and Kelman lectured at Florida International. In 1998, both men and Donna Hicks, deputy director of the Harvard program, lobbied Cuban authorities in Havana for permission to bring together young Cubans and Cuban-Americans. Alvarez then ran several workshops, including one at Harvard in 2003.

  Kelman defends Alvarez. “I’m absolutely convinced he didn’t find the Cuban political system attractive in any way,” Kelman told me. “He had an attachment to the country. He was bothered that young Cuban-Americans grew up hating and shunning the country.”

  Jorge Domínguez reacted differently. The scholar of Latin American politics was director from 1995 to 2006 of Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where Kelman’s program was housed. As president of the Institute of Cuban Studies from 1990 to 1994, he was cordial with Alvarez. Domínguez enthusiastically supported Kelman and Alvarez’s plan to foster dialogue between Cubans and Cuban-Americans.

  “When he was arrested, I didn’t want to believe it,” Domínguez told me. “This was my friend. I thought I knew him. I thought, maybe the Bush administration or the FBI was being overzealous.” As it became evident that Alvarez did work for Cuban intelligence, “I went from leaning over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt, to feeling personally betrayed. He wasn’t just spying on people like me. He was spying on me.”

  Harvard’s workshop initiative, Domínguez adds, “could have been of interest to Cuban intelligence. The most extreme scenario would be that Carlos sold it to the Cuban government as a means to penetrate the Cuban-American community. For all I know, some of the Cubans who participated in the workshops could have been intelligence agents, and that’s why they were chosen. In retrospect, it looks awful.”

  After a complaint by the state’s surgeon general, Alvarez relinquished his license to practice psychology in Florida in 2008. The American Psychological Association, to which he belonged, reviewed his case but took no disciplinary action.

  Like Maidique, Rodriguez remains close to Alvarez, and he isn’t bothered that his friend informed on him. “After he was released, we got together in Miami,” Rodriguez told me. “I said, ‘I don’t care what you said about me. It doesn’t matter. I accept it in the context of your naïveté, playing games with the Cubans, making believe you were pliable when you weren’t.’”

  According to Rodriguez, Alvarez believes that Cuban intelligence betrayed him to the FBI. His criticism of the Castro regime’s refusal to liberalize society, and his value as a public example of how Cuban intelligence had infiltrated the Cuban-American community, made him expendable. Now retired, he reads theology, and maintains his interest in reconciliation, though not between Cubans and Cuban-Americans. “He doesn’t want anything to do with Cuba anymore,” Rodriguez said. “I think he feels he was a jerk.”

  * * *

  AFTER VIOLETA CHAMORRO defeated Daniel Ortega, the Cuban-backed Sandinista president of Nicaragua, in his bid for reelection in 1990, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency dispatched Ana Montes there. She briefed Chamorro about the Cuba-trained Nicaraguan army that the new president had inherited. Perhaps, after the sting of his ally’s defeat, Fidel Castro took some consolation in knowing that his agent had the ear of the winner.

  Another U.S. government employee in Nicaragua whom Chamorro got to know was also a Cuban spy. With the Sandinistas defeated, the U.S. Agency for International Development returned to Nicaragua. Its regional legal adviser was none other than Marta Rita Velázquez. She had left the transportation department for USAID in 1989 and, like Montes, positioned herself to inform Cuba about U.S. activities and personnel in Latin America. USAID, which strives to end extreme poverty and promote democracy, worked with Chamorro on trade and education issues. She referred to Velázquez affectionately as “my little puertoriqueña.”

  Velázquez worked long hours in USAID’s Nicaragua office, reviewing its grants and contracts, which were closely scrutinized by congressional Republicans. They accused the office, which had a development budget of more than $700 million, of funding entities associated with Sandinista leaders, and forced it to void one such contract. “We had struggles with the USAID mission in Nicaragua,” recalled Daniel Fisk, a former staff member of the House and Senate foreign relations committees. “It was an outpost of the Sandinistas.”

  Daily life in Managua, the Nicaraguan capital, was chaotic. “Housing was substandard because the Sandinistas had devastated the country,” one former USAID employee told me. “Marta’s house had no running water for a year.” The currency was so unstable that workers spent their pay over the weekend, knowing it would be worthless on Monday. “The first two years, we worked on stabilizing the economy.”

  Velázquez liked socializing with other expatriates. She brought fried bananas, mashed in the Puerto Rican style, to dinner parties, and rarely missed dances that the U.S. Marine Corps held every Friday. “She was very outgoing, had that Puerto Rican spark,” a coworker said. “A great sense of humor. One time, we were going to an event at the embassy, and she said, ‘I almost made a huge gaffe. I was going to wear a red and black dress. I remembered just in time those are the Sandinista colors.’”

  The U.S. embassy discouraged employees from fraternizing with Nicaraguans. Instead, Velázquez began dating Anders Kviele, a Swedish diplomat. Their political views were likely compatible, because Sweden was sympathetic to the Castro regime. In 1975, Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, a harsh critic of the Vietnam War, had become the first Western European head of state to visit Cuba since the revolution, and praised Castro’s “forces of freedom.”

  Velázquez and Kviele were married in March 1996 at the Second Union Church in Puerto Rico. About two hundred guests attended the reception at the Caribe Hilton, an oceanfront San Juan hotel, including her father’s colleague Roberto Aponte Toro. “The wedding wasn’t lavish, but it was very nice,” Aponte Toro told me. “There was the family from Sweden, and the rest of the people were from San Juan.”

  Velázquez had given a guest lecture to one of Aponte Toro’s classes in Puerto Rico, and he had encouraged her to join her father on the law school faculty. But she declined, possibly because she was flourishing at USAID. After leaving Nicaragua in 1994, she became the agency’s chief legal officer for the Middle East and Asia, supervising two lawyers in Washington and seven more abroad. She gave legal advice in cases related to the Middle East peace process and nuclear proliferation in Asia. From 1998 to 2000, she was on leave in Sweden with her husband, but still pinch-hit for the permanent legal adviser at USAID’s mission in Moscow. In 2000, she returned to Latin America, this time to Guatemala, as director of the regional office of trade and economic analysis, heading a team of nine people on trade and economic development issues.

  Her indictment specifies several alleged contacts during her USAID career with Cuban intelligence. In 1996, it furnished her with encryption software. In 1994 and 1997, she disclosed identities of U.S. spies. After Marta gave birth to a son, Ingmar, in January 1997,
Cuban intelligence passed along the joyous news to Montes.

  Ingmar inherited his father’s Nordic looks. When Velázquez wheeled him around in the baby carriage, a former USAID colleague told me, “people thought she was the nanny. She thought it was very funny.”

  In August 1999, Velázquez had a daughter, Ingrid. By giving her children impeccably Swedish names, she may have hoped to insulate them from attention or controversy in the event of her exposure as a spy.

  * * *

  THE SOVIET UNION’S collapse didn’t end Russian spying at U.S. universities. Since ex–KGB officer Vladimir Putin became president for the first time in 2000, the country that taught Cuba to pinpoint academia has stepped up its own espionage in the United States, especially on campus, and is believed to share information with its former satellite.

  “The Russian intelligence presence in the United States is now at or above its Cold War levels,” Van Cleave said in her 2012 testimony. “While Moscow’s intelligence liaison relationships with Cuba may have waxed and waned, it is prudent to assume they haven’t gone away.”

  Since 2000, about five thousand Russian students a year have attended U.S. colleges. That doesn’t include so-called illegals, spies without diplomatic protection whom Russia sows across the United States, including at universities. Like the KGB duo who pose as suburban travel agents in the popular FX drama series The Americans, illegals assume false names and nationalities. They enjoy two advantages over traditional agents based under diplomatic cover at Russia’s embassy and consulates, who also troll campuses for gullible students and professors. First, since they’re underground, illegals generally face less FBI surveillance. Second, if they aren’t identified, they can stay in the United States even if it severs diplomatic relations with Russia and kicks out embassy personnel.

  Russian intelligence’s reliance on illegals, who may take years or decades to pay off, or even go native and shed their loyalty to the motherland, illustrates its fabled patience. “It has always been a characteristic of Russian intelligence operations that they ‘farm long-term’ and are not under any obligation to produce instant results,” intelligence historian Nigel West told me. “They take the view that a small investment now, spread widely, may pay dividends later. The Chinese MSS [Ministry of State Security] has adopted the same strategy, sometimes known as a ‘scattergun’ approach. In contrast, Western agencies tend to concentrate, like a sniper, on targets with proven access, and are under pressure to provide instant results.”

  After a decade-long investigation, the FBI arrested ten Russian illegals in 2010. Largely overlooked in the media furor over Anna Chapman, the so-called sexy spy, was that Russia had placed seven of the other nine in universities, including Harvard, Columbia, The New School, and the University of Washington. One agent, Mikhail Semenko, who received a graduate degree from Seton Hall University, spoke Mandarin and had studied at Harbin Institute of Technology in China, possibly a sign of coordination between Russian and Chinese intelligence.

  Cynthia Murphy, who worked at an accounting and tax services firm in Manhattan, earned a bachelor’s degree from NYU’s Stern School of Business in 2000, and a master’s degree at Columbia Business School in 2010. Her real name was Lydia Guryeva, and her assignments from Russian intelligence were quite different from her Columbia homework. Moscow’s marching orders were to “strengthen … ties w. classmates on daily basis incl. professors who can help in job search and who will have (or already have) access to secret info” and to report “on their detailed personal data and character traits w. preliminary conclusions about their potential (vulnerability) to be recruited by Service.”

  She was ordered to dig up information on classmates applying for jobs at the CIA, or already hired there. Via radiograms or electronic messages concealed by special software, she funneled names of potential Columbia recruits to Moscow Center, which checked them against databases of agents for other countries’ intelligence services to determine if they were “clean.” She gathered “v. usefull [sic]” information on prospects for the global gold market that her handlers sent to the ministers of finance and economic development. She also cultivated financier Alan Patricof, a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Patricof said he talked to Guryeva in person and on the phone, but only about personal finances, not politics or world affairs.

  She and her husband, who was also a spy, asked Moscow in 2009 for permission to buy a house, a colonial with a hydrangea-lined walkway, in Montclair, New Jersey. The director of Russian foreign intelligence personally denied the request. Moscow Center would own their home in their names instead.

  “You were sent to USA for long-term service trip,” the center told them. “Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc.—all these serve one goal.… to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US.”

  Another illegal, Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov, taught a course on Latin America at Baruch College in 2008–09 under the name Juan Lazaro. He criticized U.S. foreign policy so vehemently that he was dismissed at the end of the semester.

  The illegals apparently made few American converts. Putin’s defiance of the United States hasn’t captured the imagination of American academics the way that Fidel Castro’s did, and his brand of state capitalism lacks the appeal that communism held long ago for the Cambridge Five. “No one’s spying for the Russians because they have an ideological message,” says Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert and professor of global affairs at New York University.

  The illegals pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as unlawful agents of the Russian Federation within the United States, and were traded back to Moscow. Reached by phone in Russia, where Guryeva works for Vnesheconombank, a state corporation that supports economic development, she pretended it was a wrong number and hung up.

  Three years after the FBI busted the illegals’ ring, it recorded two Russian spies under diplomatic cover, Igor Sporyshev and Victor Pobodnyy, discussing efforts to recruit several young women with ties to New York University. Both men specialized in economic espionage and were supposed to gather information on U.S. alternative energy initiatives, as well as on sanctions against Russia.

  While Sporyshev elicited “a positive response without any feelings of rejection” from one woman, he told Pobodnyy in April 2013, another reacted less favorably. “I have lots of ideas about such girls but these ideas are not actionable because they don’t allow you to get close enough. And in order to be close you either need to fuck them or use other levers to influence them to execute my requests. So when you tell me about girls, in my experience, it’s very rare that something workable will come of it.”

  * * *

  ANA MONTES EXPECTED to spend 2001 at Langley on a prestigious National Intelligence Council fellowship that would have brought more classified documents within her grasp. But her assignment was postponed, on a pretext.

  Cuba’s uncanny ability to anticipate U.S. military and intelligence maneuvers in Latin America, as well as suspicions of Montes’s loyalty by DIA counterintelligence analysts, had spurred a DIA-FBI mole hunt. Information from a senior official in the Cuban Intelligence Services also implicated Montes. Ten days after the September 11, 2001, attacks, amid concerns that she might transmit U.S. plans for the invasion of Afghanistan to her Cuban handlers, she was arrested.

  U.S. authorities initially considered seeking the death penalty for Montes’s treason, but the Department of Justice “raised the evidence threshold so high it could never be met,” Simmons told me. Likely facing life in prison, Montes pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington, D.C., and agreed to cooperate with the FBI, in return for a twenty-five-year term. At her sentencing, she read an unrepentant statement in her black-and-white prison garb. “Your honor, I engaged in the activity that brought me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than the law,” she said. “I believe our government’s policy toward Cuba is cruel and unfair, profoundly unneighborly, and I felt morally obligated to help the island defend its
elf from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.… I did what I thought right to counter a grave injustice. My greatest desire is to see amicable relations emerge between the United States and Cuba. I hope my case in some way will encourage our government to abandon its hostility towards Cuba and to work with Havana in a spirit of tolerance, mutual respect, and understanding.”

  Gleijeses praised his former student’s statement as “dignified, very impressive.” Emilia Montes was—and remains—heartbroken. “I no longer believe in causes,” she told me. “She wasted the best years of her life.”

  The FBI is still curious about Montes. Around 2013, two agents interviewed Gleijeses for an hour at SAIS. He told them how Montes had pretended to seek his inside knowledge on the Cuba military, while actually testing whether the Castros could trust him. They didn’t explain why they were interested in Montes, who by then had served half her sentence. “They said they were reviewing something about her case,” Gleijeses said.

  Montes’s arrest alarmed Kendall Myers, the aristocratic, Castro-worshipping SAIS instructor and State Department analyst. He and Gwendolyn began taking more precautions, and only met their Cuban handlers outside the United States. Then, in April 2009, on Kendall Myers’s seventy-second birthday, an FBI agent purporting to be a Cuban intelligence officer accosted the professor in front of the SAIS building, giving him a Cuban cigar and regards from their superiors in Havana. The encounter spurred a series of meetings in hotel lounges, ostensibly to solicit the professor’s political insights, at which Myers and his wife were gulled into confessing their espionage.

  “I have great admiration for Ana Montes,” Myers told the agent. “She’s a hero.… But she took too many chances.” He added that he and Montes supplied some of the same information to Cuban intelligence. “There was duplication.… Because I read the stuff that she gave.”