A State Department report said Cuba’s intelligence service continues to have “scores of still-unidentified agents” inside the U.S. government.
The report, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” takes a deep dive into how the communist country has run a decades-long subversion campaign against the U.S., tying the Cuban government to a wide range of American left-wing groups and historical figures.
According to the report, Cuba’s Direccion de Inteligencia (DI) has run one of the most effective espionage operations against the U.S. government for more than 60 years. Former CIA counterintelligence chief James Olson has called it more effective than the former Soviet Union’s KGB.
During those six decades, the agency has played a central role in a “dazzling array of operations,” the report said, including infiltrating universities, organizing revolutionary movements in the U.S., and training Palestinian terrorists in South Yemen.
Several high-ranking American intelligence professionals who worked against the DI have been outspoken about the threat the Cuban intelligence agency continues to pose to the U.S.
They include Mr. Olson, who helped unmask many of the most notorious Cuban spies operating in the U.S. since the end of the Cold War, the report said. He has publicly estimated that the DI has many still-unidentified agents operating inside America, including numerous senior agents within the U.S. government.
Olson discussed the issue on a 2020 podcast, describing the DI as “a very formidable adversary. They were very professional.”
He added, “They were very disciplined and they had a vendetta against the United States. [Fidel] Castro focused all of his efforts on national security to bringing down his Yankee neighbor, to attacking us. They were impenetrable.
“They were tough. We had very little success against them. We underestimated them. And we paid a real price for that. … The Cubans have [still] penetrated our government. … I guarantee you, we only know the tip of the iceberg.”
Chris Simmons, a retired Pentagon expert on Cuban intelligence who helped unmask Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes — a senior analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency who was arrested in 2001 and released in 2023 — estimated in a 2009 interview with the Miami Herald that Havana maintains about 250 agents and their handlers in the U.S.
Based on past Cuban “tactics, techniques and procedures,” Simmons said, that figure would include six to nine senior agents within the U.S. government comparable to Montes, more than a dozen in academia, and 30 to 36 operating under diplomatic cover at Cuban missions in Washington and New York. An additional 135, he noted, are likely focused on monitoring Cuban Americans, largely in South Florida.
In March, the Cuban government promoted Havana’s Nuestra America Convoy, which drew activists, European politicians and American liberal figures in defiance of U.S. sanctions.
According to the report, organizers described the effort as “mobilizing by air, land and sea” to transport goods to Cuba, and 120 organizations from 33 countries took part.
The report named several notable participants, including:
Hasan Piker — described elsewhere in the report as a “celebrity leftist streamer” who produced a pro-Cuba documentary through a media organization called Belly of the Beast LLC.
Christian Smalls — founder of the Amazon Labor Union.
A delegation from the Democratic Socialists of America.
Jeremy Corbyn — former U.K. Labour Party leader.
Pablo Iglesias Turrion — former Spanish deputy prime minister.
Several unnamed current and former members of the European Parliament.
Isra Hirsi — a campus activist and daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar, Minnesota Democrat.
The report also examines the Venceremos Brigade, which has brought roughly 10,000 American activists to Cuba since 1969. It describes the brigade as a vehicle for propaganda and intelligence collection, linking its founding generation to the creation of the Weather Underground, the domestic militant extremist group. The report cites FBI reporting alleging Cuban officials assisted Weather Underground members in evading capture.
Numerous brigade alumni have gone on to hold significant positions in American public life, the report notes, including Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who organized for the brigade in the 1970s and publicly expressed condolences over Castro’s death in 2016.
The report cites several arrests and prosecutions of Cuban spies in recent years, including punishment for Victor Manuel Rocha, a former State Department Foreign Service officer, National Security Council staffer under President Bill Clinton, U.S. ambassador to Bolivia and adviser to U.S. Southern Command.
According to the report, Rocha, 75, spied for Cuba between 1973 and 2023, when he was charged by the Biden Justice Department with acting as an agent of the Cuban government for decades. He pleaded guilty in April 2024 to conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government and was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. The Trump Justice Department has since filed a civil denaturalization complaint seeking to strip Rocha of his U.S. citizenship.
Montes was arrested 10 days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She was recruited in 1984 as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and went on to become the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba analyst, earning the nickname “Queen of Cuba” from colleagues, the report said.
Over 17 years, she passed classified material on Cuban military capabilities, reportedly exposed the identities of undercover U.S. officers, and is believed to have compromised a secret military base in El Salvador and a multibillion-dollar satellite surveillance program. She was released from federal prison three years ago.
The report also cites the case of Walter Kendall Myers, a great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell who taught at Johns Hopkins and worked in the State Department’s intelligence bureau. He and his wife, Gwendolyn, spied for Cuba for roughly 30 years after their recruitment in 1978-79, at one point meeting privately with Castro in 1995. Myers was sentenced to life in prison in 2010 and died in federal custody this past March.
Gwendolyn was sentenced to 81 months behind bars and was released in 2015.
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