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MsSparkie · 08-15-2006, 06:57 AM

In 2005, Fidel was furious when Forbes Magazine estimated his fortune at $500 million. This year, the magazine upped his worth to $900 million. Particularly in view of Cuba’s penury, this amount is surely more than enough for Raúl to bribe his political cronies and buy any new allies he needs.

In 1973 I spent a “working vacation” in Havana. Raúl gave me a tour of a huge factory manufacturing double-walled suitcases and other concealment devices for secretly transporting arms and explosives for terrorist purposes. By then Raúl’s DGI was working around the clock to expand Cuba’s political influence in South America and the Third World. In particular, they were striving to consolidate the Sandinistas’ power in 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. Raúl’s DGI and his military also had advisers and instructors in Palestine Liberation Organization bases and had established close cooperation with Libya, South Yemen, and the Polisario Front for the Liberation of Western Sahara. In the mid-1970s my DIE was working jointly with Raúl’s DGI to support the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist, anti-American insurgency organization whose task was to spread Communism to South America.

In December 1974 Raúl came to Bucharest to request intelligence and political support for his new National Liberation Directorate (DNL), a party/intelligence group tasked to coordinate Cuba’s guerrilla and terrorist training camps and to prop up national liberation movements and anti-American governments such as those of Nicaragua and Grenada. He got both.

Of course I no longer have inside access to information about Raúl’s export of terrorism and revolution, but I note that in 2001 his FARC took credit for 197 killings in Colombia. On April 11, 2002, the same FARC kidnapped 13 Colombian lawmakers from a government building in Cali and held Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt hostage. On February 13, 2003, FARC shot down a CIA plane carrying out electronic intelligence-gathering in southern Colombia, taking three CIA officers hostage. Now Raúl’s FARC is seeking to overthrow the pro-American government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whose father was assassinated by FARC in 1983. I also note that the Communist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who idolizes the Castro brothers, has threatened to stop exporting oil to the U.S. and intends to start a conventional war against neighboring Colombia, the main U.S. ally in the region.

Neither within Cuba nor in the outside world does anyone have a clear picture of Fidel’s health — physical or political. Yet perhaps there is something else going on there that Raúl may have learned from his KGB masters. Leonid Brezhnev died on November 10, 1982, but the KGB chairman, Yury Andropov, managed for a few days to keep his death secret from the public, to gain time for maneuvering himself into the driver’s seat. Once settled into the Kremlin, the cynical Andropov hastened to portray himself to the West as a “moderate” Communist and a sensitive, warm, Western-oriented man who allegedly enjoyed an occasional drink of scotch, liked to read English novels, and loved listening to American jazz and the music of Beethoven. Andropov was none of the above.

Raúl may try to also portray himself as a peaceloving angel. But Andropov’s age of secrecy is gone. I pray that others who know Raúl as well as I knew Ceausescu will come forward and disrobe the Cuban tyrant, allowing the world to see him naked, the way he truly is: an assassin and international terrorist who made a fortune from the illegal sale of arms, drugs, and human beings.

— Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking official ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. On Christmas Day of 1989, Ceausescu and his wife were sentenced to death at the end of a trial where most of the accusations had come almost word-for-word out of Pacepa’s book Red Horizons.

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The good news: Raúl Castro suffers from cirrhosis of the liver.

08-15-2006, 06:57 AM	#15
MsSparkie Curious Sagittarius Join Date: Jul 2006 Location: Toronto, Canada Posts: 302	In 2005, Fidel was furious when Forbes Magazine estimated his fortune at $500 million. This year, the magazine upped his worth to $900 million. Particularly in view of Cuba’s penury, this amount is surely more than enough for Raúl to bribe his political cronies and buy any new allies he needs. In 1973 I spent a “working vacation” in Havana. Raúl gave me a tour of a huge factory manufacturing double-walled suitcases and other concealment devices for secretly transporting arms and explosives for terrorist purposes. By then Raúl’s DGI was working around the clock to expand Cuba’s political influence in South America and the Third World. In particular, they were striving to consolidate the Sandinistas’ power in 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. Raúl’s DGI and his military also had advisers and instructors in Palestine Liberation Organization bases and had established close cooperation with Libya, South Yemen, and the Polisario Front for the Liberation of Western Sahara. In the mid-1970s my DIE was working jointly with Raúl’s DGI to support the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist, anti-American insurgency organization whose task was to spread Communism to South America. In December 1974 Raúl came to Bucharest to request intelligence and political support for his new National Liberation Directorate (DNL), a party/intelligence group tasked to coordinate Cuba’s guerrilla and terrorist training camps and to prop up national liberation movements and anti-American governments such as those of Nicaragua and Grenada. He got both. Of course I no longer have inside access to information about Raúl’s export of terrorism and revolution, but I note that in 2001 his FARC took credit for 197 killings in Colombia. On April 11, 2002, the same FARC kidnapped 13 Colombian lawmakers from a government building in Cali and held Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt hostage. On February 13, 2003, FARC shot down a CIA plane carrying out electronic intelligence-gathering in southern Colombia, taking three CIA officers hostage. Now Raúl’s FARC is seeking to overthrow the pro-American government of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whose father was assassinated by FARC in 1983. I also note that the Communist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who idolizes the Castro brothers, has threatened to stop exporting oil to the U.S. and intends to start a conventional war against neighboring Colombia, the main U.S. ally in the region. Neither within Cuba nor in the outside world does anyone have a clear picture of Fidel’s health — physical or political. Yet perhaps there is something else going on there that Raúl may have learned from his KGB masters. Leonid Brezhnev died on November 10, 1982, but the KGB chairman, Yury Andropov, managed for a few days to keep his death secret from the public, to gain time for maneuvering himself into the driver’s seat. Once settled into the Kremlin, the cynical Andropov hastened to portray himself to the West as a “moderate” Communist and a sensitive, warm, Western-oriented man who allegedly enjoyed an occasional drink of scotch, liked to read English novels, and loved listening to American jazz and the music of Beethoven. Andropov was none of the above. Raúl may try to also portray himself as a peaceloving angel. But Andropov’s age of secrecy is gone. I pray that others who know Raúl as well as I knew Ceausescu will come forward and disrobe the Cuban tyrant, allowing the world to see him naked, the way he truly is: an assassin and international terrorist who made a fortune from the illegal sale of arms, drugs, and human beings. — Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking official ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. On Christmas Day of 1989, Ceausescu and his wife were sentenced to death at the end of a trial where most of the accusations had come almost word-for-word out of Pacepa’s book Red Horizons. ____________________________________________________________ The good news: Raúl Castro suffers from cirrhosis of the liver. __________________ ~There is a forest in an acorn......