Cuban Five - Activities

Activities

The "Cuban Five" were Cuban intelligence officers who were part of "La Red Avispa", or Wasp Network, which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) dismantled with 10 arrests in 1998. According to Gerardo Hernández, the leader of the cell, and as reported by Saul Landau in the political magazine CounterPunch, the network observed and infiltrated a number of Cuban-American groups: Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National Foundation, and Brothers to the Rescue. The court found that they had infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based organization that flew small aircraft over the Florida straits in efforts to rescue rafters fleeing Cuba, and had on some flights intentionally violated Cuban airspace and dropped leaflets. They obtained employment as laborers at the Key West Naval Air Station and sent the Cuban government detailed reports about the movement of aircraft and military personnel, and descriptions of the layout of the facility and its structures. They also attempted to penetrate the Miami facility of Southern Command, which plans and oversees operations of all U.S. military forces throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. On February 24, 1996, two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were shot down by Cuban military jets in international airspace while flying away from Cuban airspace, killing four U.S. citizens aboard. The U.S. government also accused the remaining four of lying about their identities and sending 2,000 pages of unclassified information obtained from U.S. military bases to Cuba. The network received clandestine communications from Cuba via the Atención numbers station.

U.S. government organizations, including the FBI, had been monitoring Cuban spy activities for over 30 years, but made only occasional arrests. However, after the two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were shot down by Cuban MiGs in February 1996 and four U.S. citizens were killed, on the basis of information sent to Cuba by an infiltrator of the group, the Clinton administration launched a crackdown. According to U.S. attorney José Pertierra, who acts for the Venezuelan government in its attempts to extradite Luis Posada Carriles, the crackdown was aided by the cooperation of the Cuban authorities with the FBI in 1997. The Cubans provided 175 pages of documents to FBI agents investigating Posada Carriles's role in the 1997 bombings in Havana, but the FBI failed to use the evidence to follow up on Posada. Instead, they used it to uncover the spy network that included the Cuban Five. According to FBI evidence at the trial, the FBI had been monitoring the communications of Hernández, whose information enabled the shootdown, for several years prior to that event. He was not arrested until 1998.