Cuban double agents are the subject of one of John Kiriakou’s most absolute claims about CIA operations: that the Agency has never successfully recruited a Cuban. Asked directly whether Cuban intelligence was regarded inside the CIA as especially capable, he answered “Absolutely, yes” — and went further, calling the Cuban intelligence service “one of the best on the planet.”[1][2]
The recruitment record
The evidence Kiriakou offers is the record on the other side of the ledger. In its shortest form: “the CIA has never recruited a Cuban who didn’t turn out to be a double agent.”[3][4] In a longer telling, prompted by a Bolivian viewer’s question about how Cuban intelligence was regarded inside the Agency, he put it as a total: “of all the Cubans ever recruited by the CIA, literally every one of them turned out to be a double agent, a double agent working for the Cuban intelligence service. They are brilliant.”[1]
Why the service is invisible
Kiriakou’s explanation for why a service that good is so little discussed is that it does not operate the way the CIA does. The Cubans “are defensive in nature. Their job is to protect Cuba” — they are not, in his phrasing, plotting invasions of Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan, or running military operations in Somalia, Libya or Syria.[5] He attributes their tradecraft in part to their training: they were trained by the KGB, and are “smart and accomplished” and “just really, really good at what they do.”[5]
Ranking against the other services
The claim usually surfaces inside a ranking of the foreign services best at recruiting Americans. Kiriakou names the Israelis first and the Russians second — “the Russians have a long view, they’re quite good at it too” — and, where his interviewer expected the Chinese to be third, named the Cubans instead.[3][4]
The Chinese place lower in his ranking not for lack of effort but for lack of finesse. They are, he says, “very, very laser-focused” on technology, but “don’t really have a true understanding and appreciation of American culture” — the Chinese approach being to walk up and say “I will give you money. You give me technology,” with, as he puts it, no “at least buy me a drink first.”[6][4]
The general counterintelligence problem
The Cuban record is Kiriakou’s sharpest illustration of a wider hazard he describes as one of the biggest intelligence threats to the United States, and one that has run for eight decades. Recruiting a Russian, a Chinese, a Cuban, an Iranian or a North Korean carries the same standing doubt: “you always have to worry that you didn’t actually recruit them. They allowed you to recruit them so that they could be double agents and report back to their home services.”[7][8]
Counterintelligence work of this kind is, in his account, the most tightly held category of operation in the Agency — “there is literally nothing more compartmentalized than counterintelligence operations” — to the point that he knew nothing of the Aldrich Ames case while serving.[9]