SPOT? IT IS BLIND:

The CIA's Blind Spot (Marc Pitzke, 8/04/06, Der Spiegel)

"Wait and see" -- Bush's fecklessness shines through even in the official language. "We don't know what the condition of Fidel Castro is; we don't know the exact facts of this," White House spokesman Tony Snow said clumsily at a press briefing Tuesday. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack spoke in similar terms. "I don't think there are too many people outside that small core group of people who run Cuba who really know what is going on," he said Thursday.

So now -- as history arrives at the moment a whole generation once wished for -- the end of Castro's reign threatens to become a lost opportunity. Instead of reaching out to a new Cuba and playing a constructive role in the state's transformation, Washington is relying on old, unsuccessful recipes: blockade, sanctions and a hardline approach.

"U.S. policy is going to remain the same irrespective of whether it's Fidel Castro or Raul Castro in power," sighs Daniel Erikson, a Cuba expert at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank. Pride leads to stubbornness: "If the Cuban government implements a smooth transfer, that would indicate a failure of U.S. policy," Erikson says.

As for US intelligence services, they're especially vague when it comes to Cuba. The rigid attitude taken for decades by both Democrats and Republicans turns out to be a handicap. Taking its cue from the Cuban-exile lobby in Miami, Washington shut out Castro's government, only to find itself shut out of Cuba.

When John Negroponte became National Intelligence Director in 2005, he immediately requested an analysis of the Cuban situation from his agencies. But the Americans haven't had access to reliable intelligence sources for decades, let alone to circles of power in Havana. Following the start of the US embargo on Cuba in 1960, all economic relations were severed -- and with them all informal channels of communication. Meanwhile, Cuban Cohiba cigars smuggled into the US became all the rage among American diplomats. The only information that trickeled through came from defectors like Alcibiades Hidalgo, Cuba's former ambassador to the United Nations, who defected from his position in 2002 and revealed that "virtually every member of the Cuban mission to the UN" works as an intelligent agent for Castro.

The US can only dream of keeping such a close eye on Cuba. Former CIA analyst Robert Baer believes the CIA will have a tough time convincing President Bush that it knows exactly what will happen when Castro dies. CIA analysts will have to rely on second- and even third-hand information, Baer believes, and compares their information about Cuba to the spotty information that was available about Iraq during the 1990s. Which bodes ill for a new policy.

So Castro is beating the "empire" with its own weapons even from his deathbed. Ten US presidents have unsuccessfully locked horns with him since 1959. They've planned his overthrow and his assassination. They tried to isolate him -- and succeeded only in strengthening him. They all made the same mistake -- "a consistent underestimation of his political strength," in the words of Cuba expert Philip Peters, Vice President of the Lexington Institute and an advisor to the Cuba Working Group of the US House of Representatives.

Rather than relying on intelligence that is always faulty we succeed when we impose a new reality.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 4, 2006 1:02 PM