CUBAN FUMBLES TRY AT SPYING; WAS TOO STRAIGHTFORWARD, U.S. SAYS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201090074-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 9, 2012
• Sequence Number: 74
• Publication Date: July 20, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part -Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09 :CIA-RDP9O-009658000201090074-2
ARTICLE APtEARED
ON PAGE w
THE PHILADELi'HIti INi~UIREit
20 JULY 1982
Cuban fumbles try at spying;
was too straightforward, U.S. says
By Jim McGee
and Alfonso Charily
K~i~haRidder Hera Service
MIAMI - As a spy, Mario Monzon
Basta is a flop.
In disgrace, he packed his bags last
week and caught a flight home to
Havana.
To the US. government, Monzon
was just another secret agent tripped
up in the world of espionage. To the
Cuban government, he was an hon-
est diplomat wrongly accused.
The undoing of Mario Monzon Bar-
ata began one day in June when he
dialed the telephone number for Mi-
crodyne Corp. in Ocala, Fla. Because
he spoke Spanish, sales clerk Tina
Lopez got on the line.
He was less than candid. He didn't
tell anyone he held the position of
second secretary at Fidel Castro's
mission to the United Nations.
!t was not the fast ume Monzon
had ordered from Microdyne, a com-
pany that makes top-secret material
for the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration and the Penta?
Bon.
In a businesslike manner, Monzon
rattled off model numbers for 17
satellite receivers. They contain cir-
cuits made nowhere else in the
world, the company says.
Monzon wanted them shipped to
his apartment in New York City. Mi?
crodyne insisted he pay in advance.
On Friday, June 26, his cashier's
check for 539,000 arrived in the mail.
Louis Wolcott, president of Micro-
dyne, spotted the check. An attached
letter in Spanish caught his eye.
Wolcott pays attention to such de-
tails. His fear, he said, is industrial
espionage.
The FBI worries about espionage,
too, the foreign kind. Somehow, it
figured out what was happening in
Ocala. An FBI, agent telephoned Wol?
colt at home that weekend to tell him
that Monzon was a Cuban diplomat.
~~'olcott didn't need to be told that
such companies as Microdyne are
targets of the Soviet Union's intelli?
Bence sen~ice, the KGB, and that the
r:GI3 is ~~er}? friendly ?~ith Cuba.
In ~'~ ashir,gton. State Department
of;icials pondered the situation.
So, on Thursday; July 2, Microdyne
addressed x300-pound package to
Monzon's apartment in New York
and summoned United Parcel Ser-
vice. As the UPS truck departed from
Microdyne's lot, a Customs vehicle,
swung in behind and followed it fo a
warehouse in Orlando, Fle.
In Orlando the next day, Monzon's
package was seized under a search
warrant. In New York, the State De-
partment declared Monzon and his
secretary ,persona pon grata.
!n Washington, Cuban diplomats'
said they were shocked. They argued
that the Microdyne equipment was
just run?of?the-mill receivers used to
pick up cable television signals.
Wolcott disagreed. "It is high tech-
nology," he said. "It has no military
application, but it does have circuits
I'm sure they don't have in Cuba or
Russia."
The expulsion. leaves one question:.
If Monzon was a trained spy, why was
he so blatant -using his real name
and leaving behind an obvious paper
trail with his check?
An administration official said
Monzon could afford to be brazen
because the United States "is a big
country, an open country without a
lot of controls" and he could get
away with it. "He knew What he was
doing very well."
Back in-Ocala, Wolcott also knew
what to do. "I put the check in the
bank." he said.
Monzon was no stranger to FBI
counterintelligence agents. They
had shadowed him in bfanhattan,
believing he worked for the General
Directorate of Intelligence, Cuba's
CIA. They also believed that they
knew his mission: recruitment of
sources among the Cuban exiles and
acquisition of high-technology
equipment.
One administration official said
Monzon had successfully purchased
"hundreds of thousands of doliars.of
equipment" since his arrival from
Cuba in September 1980, but "some of
the shipments got away from -lts"
Now, the United States had several
options. It could pretend nothing had
happened.
"You are much better off knowing
who the other sides' agents are," said
one federal source, "because then
you are able to keep track of tbem."
The other options were to quietly
stop the shipment and send Monzon
packing.
This wasn't the first time the US.
government faced this situation with
a Cuban diplomat. Seventeen months
ago, it expelled Ricardo Escartin.
Escartin had traveled throughout
the United States, inviting business
executives to visit Cuba and cut lu-
crative deals. His pitch was simple:
American businessmen could evade
the embargo by selling their goods to
Cuban?controlied dummy corpora-
tions in Canada, Panama, Jamaica or
Czechoslovakia.
It was because of people like Escar-
iin that the U.S. Customs Service
launched Operation Exodus - re-
versing the agency's traditional fo-
cus of examining what came into a
country and looking to see what had
left the United States.
So far, Exodus has produced sei-
zures of computer terminals in Bos-
ton, microwave equipment in New
York and minicomputers in West
Germany.
California is the high-tech capital
of the nation. But because of compa?
Hies like Microdyne, there are Exo-
dus agents at work in Flotida, too.
In the P.7onzon case, the L'~nited
States devised a strate~'. 'i'~e}? told
}S'olcott he should ship the equip-
. ment as ordered.
Declassified in Part -Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09 :CIA-RDP9O-009658000201090074-2