In the book, Castro's Secrets â?? The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine (2012), author Brian Latell, a professor, scholar, and retired CIA officer who had been active in foreign intelligence for 35 years, relies extensively on information provided by half a dozen Cuban defectors and several retired CIA officers. However, the most intriguing and reliable revelations (i.e., pure facts without any embellishment or speculation) come to light from Florentino Aspillaga Lombard ("Tiny"), the most knowledgeable and valuable foreign intelligence officer to ever defect from Cuba's powerful Directorio General de Inteligencia (DGI).
Tiny Aspillaga defected that fateful summer in 1987 in the midst of the turbulent and historic years of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's Glasnost and Perestroika â?? but still four years before the total collapse of the Soviet empire. (Reagan with Gorbachev, photo right) Aspillaga had served with distinction in the elite ranks of the DGI and had even received a personal commendation from Fidel Castro. After Aspillaga began working with the CIA, he immediately exposed dozens of Cuban double agents, who had infiltrated American intelligence, political and cultural institutions, as well as various anti-Castro groups. Many of these Cuban double agents had been operating for over two decades, inflicting untold damage on the U.S. The most highly placed double agents were handled personally by Fidel Castro, who, for nearly fifty years, acted as Cubaâ??s supreme spymaster!
Ironically, the legendary American counterintelligence (CI) chief, James Jesus Angleton, was not involved in tracking these Cuban operations, which were outside his purview. And unfortunately, those in the CIA who had jurisdiction in the 1960s and 1970s did not take the threat seriously, contemptuously dismissing DGI operations as those of a third world country and unworthy of their time or effort. They would pay dearly for this negligence and cavalier attitude.
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