&nbsp;<font id="role_document" face="Arial" color="#000000" size="4"><div>
  <strong>Who Is Raúl Castro?&nbsp; </strong></font>
  <font id="role_document" face="Arial" color="#000000" size="2"><strong>A 
  tyrant only a brother could love.<br>
  </strong>August 10, 2006<br>
  By Ion Mihai Pacepa<br>
  <br>
  </font><font id="role_document" face="Arial" color="#000000" size="1">Ion 
  Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence official ever&nbsp;&nbsp;to have 
  defected from the Soviet bloc country of Romania.&nbsp; The CIA&nbsp;&nbsp;<br>
  described his cooperation as &quot;an important and unique contribution&nbsp;&nbsp;to the 
  United States.&quot;</font><font id="role_document" face="Arial" color="#000000" size="2"><br>
  <br>
  Fidel Castro may be on his deathbed. Or he's already gone.&nbsp;&nbsp;<br>
  <br>
  Unfortunately, in&nbsp;the Communist countries of Latin heritage, the tyrants came 
  in&nbsp;&nbsp;pairs - buy&nbsp;one, get one free. Communist Romania got Nicolae and 
  Elena&nbsp;&nbsp;Ceausescu. Cuba&nbsp;got Fidel and Raúl Castro. On Christmas Day 1989 the 
  Romanians rid themselves of both Ceausescus, and twelve years later 
  Romania&nbsp;joined NATO.<br>
  Cuba will soon be left with one Castro, who is heir to the throne.<br>
  <br>
  So who is Raúl Castro? While Western experts speculate that he may&nbsp;plan on 
  shifting Cuba toward collective leadership and democracy, that's&nbsp;nothing but 
  wishful thinking. To be sure, I wish they were right, but Raúl has&nbsp;transformed 
  a paradise on earth into a shambles, and there is good&nbsp;reason to&nbsp;believe that 
  he will turn Cuba into an even worse tyranny.<br>
  <br>
  I met Raúl many times, both in Cuba and in Romania. He 
  had&nbsp;coordinating&nbsp;responsibility for the Cuban intelligence service (the 
  Dirección&nbsp;General de&nbsp;Inteligencia, or DGI), and in the early 1970s he entered 
  into a&nbsp;&nbsp;drug venture&nbsp;with my former service (the Departamentul de Informatii 
  Externe ,or&nbsp;DIE).&nbsp;Whenever he was not in Havana or Moscow, he was in 
  Bucharest. We&nbsp;worked,&nbsp;talked, fished, and snorkeled together. We challenged 
  each other at&nbsp;the&nbsp;firing range; he was an excellent shot. Together we raced 
  our&nbsp;identical Alfa&nbsp;Romeo cars. I saw nothing in him suggesting he might ever 
  want to&nbsp;democratize Cuba.<br>
  <br>
  Raúl was always under the influence -of alcohol and self-importance. My&nbsp;Cuban 
  intelligence counterpart in those days, Sergio del Valle, who&nbsp;was&nbsp;Raúl's 
  closest associate going back to their early days in the Sierra&nbsp;Maestra, used 
  to call his boss &quot;Raúl the Terrible&quot; in a semi-serious&nbsp;allusion to the first 
  Russian to crown himself tsar. Raúl was Cuba's&nbsp;uncrowned tsar - his official 
  title was &quot;Maximum General.&quot; Fidel&nbsp;gave the&nbsp;speeches, hour after hour. Raúl 
  ran Cuba's economy, her foreign&nbsp;policy, her&nbsp;foreign trade, her justice system, 
  her jails, her tourism - even&nbsp;her hotels&nbsp;and her beaches.<br>
  <br>
  Raúl is generally perceived as a colorless minister of defense, but&nbsp;he 
  has&nbsp;also been the brutal head of one of Communism's most 
  criminal&nbsp;institutions:&nbsp;the Cuban political police. I met him in that capacity. 
  He was&nbsp;cruel and&nbsp;ruthless. Fidel may have conceived the terror that has kept 
  Cuba in&nbsp;the&nbsp;Communist fold, but Raúl has been the butcher. He has 
  been&nbsp;&nbsp;instrumental in&nbsp;the killing and terrorizing of thousands of Cubans, and 
  there is no&nbsp;question<br>
  in my mind but that he would fight tooth and nail to preserve 
  his&nbsp;powers.&nbsp;Otherwise, sooner or later Raúl would have to account for 
  his&nbsp;crimes, and I&nbsp;do not know him to be suicidal.<br>
&nbsp;</div>
<div>
  Before meeting Raúl in the flesh, I had gotten a general picture of&nbsp;him 
  from&nbsp;Nikita Khrushchev and General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, the creator 
  of&nbsp;Communist Romania's intelligence structure, and by this time head&nbsp;of 
  the&nbsp;Soviet foreign intelligence service, the PGU (Pervoye 
  Glavnoye&nbsp;Upravleniye).&nbsp;That was in 1959. Both Soviets had arrived in Bucharest 
  on October&nbsp;&nbsp;26 for&nbsp;what was billed as a &quot;six-day vacation in Romania.&quot; Never 
  before had&nbsp;Khrushchev taken such a long vacation abroad, but neither was 
  his&nbsp;visit to&nbsp;Romania a vacation. He was there to discuss the on-going 
  Cuban&nbsp;revolution&nbsp;with the current Romanian leader, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, 
  until&nbsp;then the&nbsp;only Communist tyrant ruling a country of Latin heritage.<br>
  <br>
  Khrushchev dreamed of going down in history as the Soviet leader&nbsp;who 
  had&nbsp;installed Communism on the American continent, and he was prepared&nbsp;to go 
  to&nbsp;any lengths to see that dream come true. But Khrushchev did not&nbsp;trust 
  Fidel,&nbsp;believing he was a stranger to Marxism. The leaders of 
  Cuba's&nbsp;Communist&nbsp;party were convinced that Fidel was a dangerous adventurer, 
  and the&nbsp;Soviet&nbsp;party bureaucracy was also reluctant to endorse him.<br>
  <br>
  Khrushchev did trust Raúl, though. According to Sakharovsky, who had&nbsp;secretly 
  brought Raúl to Moscow in the mid-1950s, it had been love&nbsp;at first&nbsp;sight. Both 
  Nikita and Raúl loved vodka. Both were fascinated with&nbsp;Marxism.&nbsp;Both hated 
  school, religion, and discipline. Both considered&nbsp;themselves&nbsp;military experts. 
  Both were obsessed with espionage and&nbsp;&nbsp;<br>
  counterespionage.&nbsp;And both liked to sleep with their boots on. Sakharovsky 
  considered&nbsp;&nbsp;the&nbsp;&quot;warm relationship&quot; between the two men to have 
  convinced&nbsp;Khrushchev to&nbsp;throw himself entirely into the Cuban revolution.<br>
  <br>
  At Khrushchev's order, Sakharovsky had given Raúl an 
  intelligence&nbsp;adviser:&nbsp;Nikolay Leonov, the PGU's best expert on Latin America. 
  Leonov&nbsp;(today a&nbsp;retired KGB lieutenant general and member of the Duma) 
  provided&nbsp;Raúl with&nbsp;intelligence on the military forces of the then Cuban 
  dictator,&nbsp;Batista, and&nbsp;helped Raúl plan his guerrilla war. In June 1957, 
  Leonov gave him&nbsp;documents&nbsp;and photographs showing that Washington was 
  providing weapons and&nbsp;&nbsp;<br>
  logistical&nbsp;support to Batista, and he suggested that Raúl take a few 
  dozen&nbsp;Americans hostage to force Eisenhower to withdraw from the conflict. 
  Raúl did&nbsp;so. On&nbsp;June 26, 1958, his guerrilleros kidnapped fifty American and 
  Canadian&nbsp;military and civilian personnel working in Cuba. Fearing for 
  the&nbsp;lives of&nbsp;the hostages, Batista declared a cease-fire. That enabled 
  the&nbsp;&nbsp;Soviets to&nbsp;bring new weapons into Cuba.<br>
  <br>
  The course of the Cuban revolution was changed forever. The era 
  of&nbsp;political&nbsp;kidnappings was also introduced.<br>
  <br>
  On the night of December 31, 1958, Batista fled Cuba, and the Castro&nbsp;brothers 
  took over the country. During the following month, Raúl&nbsp;organized&nbsp;the 
  execution of hundreds of police and military officials of the&nbsp;Batista&nbsp;regime. 
  The prisoners were shot and the corpses buried in mass graves&nbsp;outside of 
  Santiago de Cuba.<br>
  <br>
  A year later, Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan landed in&nbsp;Havana. He 
  was&nbsp;welcomed by Fidel, Raúl, and the country's new KGB adviser, 
  Aleksandr&nbsp;Shitov. The latter's task was to help Raúl create a Cuban KGB and 
  a&nbsp;Soviet-style army. In 1962 Khrushchev took the unprecedented step 
  of&nbsp;appointing Shitov as ambassador to Cuba. Soon, Moscow started 
  secretly&nbsp;building rocket bases in Cuba. Khrushchev, Raúl, and Shitov - not 
  Fidel - pushed the world to the&nbsp;brink of&nbsp;nuclear war.<br>
&nbsp;</div>
<div>
  In April 1971 I visited Cuba as a member of a Romanian 
  government&nbsp;delegation&nbsp;attending a ten-year celebration of Castro's victory at 
  the Bay of&nbsp;Pigs. A&nbsp;couple of days after the ceremony, Raúl invited me to go 
  ocean&nbsp;fishing on&nbsp;his boat, together with Sergio del Valle. The other guest was 
  a Soviet&nbsp;civilian who introduced himself as Aleksandr Alekseyev. 
  &quot;That's&nbsp;Shitov,&quot; del&nbsp;Valle whispered into my ear. &quot;He's now Allende's 
  advisor.&quot; (The&nbsp;Marxist<br>
  Salvador Allende had been elected president of Chile the 
  previous&nbsp;November.)&nbsp;There, on that boat, it hit me more clearly than ever 
  before that&nbsp;it was&nbsp;Raúl, not Fidel, who was holding the reins of the 
  Cuban&nbsp;revolutionary wagon.<br>
  <br>
  In 1972 I prepared an official Ceausescu visit to Havana, and I was&nbsp;also 
  at&nbsp;his right hand during it. Fidel was the figurehead, Raúl the&nbsp;factotum. 
  The&nbsp;Cuban first lady was not Fidel's wife, but Raúl's. Elena 
  Ceausescu&nbsp;wrinkled&nbsp;up her nose at that, but eventually the two first ladies 
  hit it off&nbsp;splendidly. Both Elena and Vilma Espín Guilloys were 
  school&nbsp;dropouts, both pretended to be chemists, both had acquired phony 
  doctoral degrees,&nbsp;both had&nbsp;joined the Communist party before it had come to 
  power in their&nbsp;countries,&nbsp;both became members of the Council of State, and 
  both were&nbsp;presidents of&nbsp;their countries' Federation of Women organizations.<br>
  <br>
  During that visit, the Castro brothers and Ceausescu laid the&nbsp;foundation for&nbsp;a 
  bilateral drug venture. They wanted to flood the world with&nbsp;drugs. 
  &quot;Drugs&nbsp;could do a lot more damage to imperialism than nuclear weapons&nbsp;could,&quot; 
  Fidel&nbsp;pontificated. &quot;Drugs will erode capitalism from the inside,&quot; 
  Raúl&nbsp;agreed. I&nbsp;never heard the word &quot;money&quot; pronounced, but I was 
  already&nbsp;administering the&nbsp;money Romania was making from its own drug 
  trafficking. All of it&nbsp;&nbsp;<br>
  was going&nbsp;into Ceausescu's personal bank account. By 1978, when I left&nbsp;Romania 
  for&nbsp;good, that account, called AT-78, held a balance of some $400&nbsp;million - 
  in&nbsp;spite of the substantial dents Elena made in it when she bought&nbsp;furs 
  and&nbsp;jewelry for herself.<br>
  <br>
  In 2005, Fidel was furious when Forbes Magazine estimated his&nbsp;fortune at&nbsp;$500 
  million. This year, the magazine upped his worth to $900 million.&nbsp;Particularly 
  in view of Cuba's penury, this amount is surely more than&nbsp;enough for Raúl to 
  bribe his political cronies and buy any new&nbsp;allies he&nbsp;needs.<br>
  <br>
  In 1973 I spent a &quot;working vacation&quot; in Havana. Raúl gave me a tour&nbsp;of a&nbsp;huge 
  factory manufacturing double-walled suitcases and other&nbsp;concealment&nbsp;devices 
  for secretly transporting arms and explosives for terrorist&nbsp;purposes. By then 
  Raúl's DGI was working around the clock to expand&nbsp;Cuba's&nbsp;political influence 
  in South America and the Third World. In&nbsp;particular,&nbsp;they were striving to 
  consolidate the Sandinistas' power in&nbsp;Nicaragua, to foment a bloody war in El 
  Salvador, and to help the Soviet/Cuban-backed MPLA (Movement for the 
  Liberation of Angola) to rise to power in Angola.&nbsp;Raúl's&nbsp;DGI and his military 
  also had advisers and instructors in Palestine&nbsp;Liberation Organization bases 
  and had established close cooperation&nbsp;with&nbsp;Libya, South Yemen, and the 
  Polisario Front for the Liberation of&nbsp;Western&nbsp;Sahara. In the mid-1970s my DIE 
  was working jointly with Raúl's DGI to&nbsp;support the Revolutionary Armed Forces 
  of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist,&nbsp;anti-American insurgency organization whose 
  task was to spread&nbsp;Communism to&nbsp;South America.<br>
  <br>
  In December 1974 Raúl came to Bucharest to request intelligence and&nbsp;political 
  support for his new National Liberation Directorate (DNL), 
  a&nbsp;party/intelligence group tasked to coordinate Cuba's guerrilla 
  and&nbsp;terrorist&nbsp;training camps and to prop up national liberation movements and 
  anti-American governments such as those of Nicaragua and Grenada.&nbsp;He got&nbsp;both.<br>
  <br>
  Of course I no longer have inside access to information about&nbsp;Raúl's export&nbsp;of 
  terrorism and revolution, but I note that in 2001 his FARC took&nbsp;credit&nbsp;for 197 
  killings in Colombia. On April 11, 2002, the same FARC&nbsp;kidnapped 13&nbsp;Colombian 
  lawmakers from a government building in Cali and held&nbsp;Colombian&nbsp;presidential 
  candidate Ingrid Betancourt hostage. On February 13,&nbsp;&nbsp;2003, FARC&nbsp;shot down a 
  CIA plane carrying out electronic intelligence-gathering in&nbsp;southern Colombia, 
  taking three CIA officers hostage. Now Raúl's&nbsp;FARC is&nbsp;seeking to overthrow the 
  pro-American government of Colombian&nbsp;President&nbsp;Alvaro Uribe, whose father was 
  assassinated by FARC in 1983. I also&nbsp;note&nbsp;that the Communist president of 
  Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who&nbsp;idolizes the&nbsp;Castro brothers, has threatened to 
  stop exporting oil to the U.S. and&nbsp;intends to start a conventional war against 
  neighboring Colombia,&nbsp;the main&nbsp;U.S. ally in the region.<br>
  <br>
  Neither within Cuba nor in the outside world does anyone have a clear&nbsp;picture 
  of Fidel's health - physical or political. Yet perhaps&nbsp;there is&nbsp;something else 
  going on there that Raúl may have learned from his KGB&nbsp;masters. Leonid 
  Brezhnev died on November 10, 1982, but the KGB&nbsp;chairman,&nbsp;Yury Andropov, 
  managed for a few days to keep his death secret from&nbsp;&nbsp;the&nbsp;public, to gain time 
  for maneuvering himself into the driver's&nbsp;seat. Once&nbsp;settled into the Kremlin, 
  the cynical Andropov hastened to portray&nbsp;himself&nbsp;to the West as a &quot;moderate&quot; 
  Communist and a sensitive, warm,&nbsp;Western-oriented man who allegedly enjoyed an 
  occasional drink of&nbsp;scotch,&nbsp;liked to read English novels, and loved listening 
  to American jazz&nbsp;and the&nbsp;music of Beethoven. Andropov was none of the above.<br>
  <br>
  Raúl may try to also portray himself as a peace-loving angel. 
  But&nbsp;Andropov's&nbsp;age of secrecy is gone. I pray that others who know Raúl as 
  well as&nbsp;I knew&nbsp;Ceausescu will come forward and disrobe the Cuban tyrant, 
  allowing&nbsp;the world&nbsp;to see him naked, the way he truly is: an assassin and 
  international&nbsp;terrorist who made a fortune from the illegal sale of arms, 
  drugs,&nbsp;&nbsp;and human&nbsp;beings.<br>
  <br>
  Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking&nbsp;official ever&nbsp;to 
  have defected from the former Soviet bloc. On Christmas Day of&nbsp;1989,&nbsp;Ceausescu 
  and his wife were sentenced to death at the end of a&nbsp;trial where&nbsp;most of the 
  accusations had come almost word-for-word out of&nbsp;Pacepa's book&nbsp;Red Horizons.<br>
&nbsp;</div>
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