The FBI arrested fiery New York columnist, Vicky Pelaez in late June.  An editor and writer for the Spanish language newspaper El Diario/La Prensa, she was charged with being an unregistered agent of the Russian government.  Her far-left, anti-American columns won accolades from American progressives, and from the Hispanic diaspora in the U.S.  Released on bail to home detention during the Fourth of July long weekend, she was part of the spy swap in Vienna today that saw ten confessed Russian agents exchanged for four Russians accused of working for the U.S.

A sample from a Pelaez editorial in El Diario, translated from Spanish scorched the policies of her adopted country:  “…refusing to hear … the popular resistance and the opinion of the majority of countries in the world, the Big Boss [the United States] supported the putschists’ … illegal [Honduran] presidential elections…” Pelaez finished her Dec. 1, 2009 anti-American rant, written in her comfortable suburban house in Yonkers, N.Y., with a tired revolutionary screech, “as long as injustice and poverty remain dominant, the struggle will continue.”

Soviet intelligence operatives (the KGB and its successor, the SVR), starting in the 1920s, recruited agents in the press to influence American opinion.  The goal of the communist influence messages, as directed by Vladimir Lenin, was to destroy “the Main Enemy” from within.  Lenin used this tactic, learned in his own Revolution, because he knew the Soviet army was too weak to take on the American military.

The influence message, boiled down to its essence was, and is, “America is an irredeemably racist, sexist, foreigner-hating, imperialistic, war-mongering country that deserves to be destroyed.”  Repeating this message over and over, like an advertising campaign, rooted the message deep in the psyches of the past several generations.  The ultimate result of decades of propagating this message through the press, education and academia, and Hollywood has been the attitude known as Political Correctness. (more…)

Vicky Pelaez

The 11 arrests so far are the tip of iceberg. Many more to follow, many in South Florida.

The “South American country” where Vicky Pelaez picked up her payments from Russia’s SVR was Venezuela.

Russia’s SVR, Castro’s DGI (Directorio General de Inteligencia) and Chavez’ SEBIN, (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia) (are all linked. They all share agents and information.  Castro-Cubans run Chavez’ intelligence agency practically lock, stock and barrel.

Vicky Pelaez was a frequent traveler to Cuba where she met with Castro’s DGI Pictures exist of those meetings.

Prominent figures in South Florida under investigation and net is closing on them. One suspect was very close to a U.S. Presidential candidate during the 2008 campaign.

Sensationalist?..Perhaps. But I quote Cuban-American Arturo Cobo, a Bay of Pigs veteran and former Castro political prisoner who had a key role in identifying Castro spies and alerting the FBI to their attempted infiltration into the U.S. during the Mariel Boatlift. Details of his vital work here. (more…)

The arrest yesterday of ten Russian “moles” here recalls World War II and the late 1940s in the United States when so many Left-duping Soviet agents were embedded in our government that they almost took over the White House.

That’s right, the White House.

We know this now because of the Venona project. the secret operation that enabled us to intercept and read Russian coded messages. It was kept secret until the late 1990s. Also, the breakup of the Soviet Union enabled scholars to learn more from previously closed Russian archives. As the recent arrests show, the Russians are still at it.

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It’s the stuff thrillers are made of: our old friends the Soviets are back, this time calling themselves Russians, but up to their same old tricks: infiltrating the United States with “illegals” — sleeper agents who can pass for native but are in reality working for the home country. Here’s the bust, as reported by CBS News:

Ten alleged Russian spies have been arrested in the United States, the result of a multi-year investigation in four states, the FBI said Monday.

Eight of the 10 arrested were “carrying out long-term, ‘deep-cover’ assignments” the FBI said, while two had lesser roles in the Russian intelligence program. The arrests took place Sunday in Montclair, N.J., Yonkers, N.Y., Manhattan, Boston, and Arlington, Va.

Their job, according to the court papers in the case, was “to search and develop ties in policymaking circles” in the United States.

George Koval

Well, surprise, surprise. One of the great under-reported media stories for at least the past half century has been the Soviet “illegals” program, a continuous attempt to undermine the U.S. by seeding deep-cover agents and helping them rise to significant posts in academe, journalism and, of course, governmental circles. I wrote about one such agent at length in the May 2009 issue of Smithsonian magazine — George Koval, who was born in Iowa to radical communist parents, returned to the Soviet Union to settle in Birobizhan (Stalin’s “Jewish autonomous region” in Siberia), studied in Moscow, was recruited by the GRU — Soviet military intelligence — and sent back to the U.S., where he wormed his way into the Manhattan Project and become perhaps the foremost atomic spy, surpassing even Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs. (more…)

The Huffington Post’s Cuba-based writer, Margarita Alarcon, informs us that treating Cuba, “this small island,” as “a threat to U.S. integrity so much that the Department of State puts it on its list of terrorist nations is considered tantamount to political dementia.”  In fact, Margarita Alarcon’s views closely parallel those of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s former Latin American head, Ana Belen Montes.

In a 1998 report entitled “National Intelligence Estimate on Cuba” and largely authored by Ms. Montes, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that:

Castro poses no significant threat to the U.S. or any of its hemispheric neighbors. No evidence exists that that Cuba is trying to foment any instability in the Western Hemisphere.

The Clinton administration based its Cuba policy on this eminently authoritative report. After all, its primary author had access to all U.S. intelligence on Cuba and led briefings on Capitol Hill, at the State Department and the Pentagon regarding Cuban policy. “On Cuba,” one government official said. “Montes was who you went to.”

Four years after issuing that report, its primary author was in U.S. federal prison having been convicted of espionage, (the same charges against the Rosenbergs) and having narrowly dodged their death sentence only with a plea bargain. Turned out that Montes, (a frequent visitor to Cuba on “academic exchanges”) had been working for Castro since the 80’s. (more…)

In June 2007 Castro’s Stalinist regime held a “tourism fair” in Havana to kick-off an ambitious plan to boost the Cuban military’s tourist booty. By some peculiar coincidence NBC’s Today Show decided to broadcast from Havana that very week. Amidst smiling, clapping, dancing tourists, Matt Lauer and Andrea Mitchell advised viewers on how to legally vacation in Cuba.

Don’t look for this from NBC, but Castro’s Soviet-trained and armed military and secret police own most of Cuba’s tourist facilities. Along with providing these inquisitive Cuban officials with certain “insights” regarding visitors to Castro’s fiefdom, this set-up also insures that most of the money that tourists spend in Cuba lands in the pocket of the only people in Cuba with guns.

Yet Castro apologists and/or agents (both on the payroll and off) keep insisting that a flood of rich Western tourists will magically smother Cuban Stalinism whereupon the island nation will quickly mutate into a bigger (and more historic and picturesque) Cozumel. This logic (which Matt and Andrea naturally shared) seems to go something like this: rewarding and enriching the KGB-trained and heavily armed guardians of Cuba’s Stalinist status-quo will magically convert them into instant opponents of that Stalinist status quo.

Amazingly, this line of reasoning fails to convince those with first-hand experience under Cuba’s Stalinist regime. But never mind this insufferable rabble of “Cuban-American right-wing crackpots!” and their congressional allies. And never mind the evidence. (more…)

A blast from the past, and a warning for the future.  There’s some typical KGB boasting here — and remember that, in the end, they lost — but it’s worth watching and paying heed to:

Maybe it’s also time we brought ourselves up to speed on the Soviet illegals program, the results of which are still with us.  The Soviets spent a great deal of time and money identifying possible collaborators (whether witting or unwitting) in the homeland of the Principal Enemy — that was their name for the United States — and then gliding the recruits along their support networks of fellow travelers and sympathetic “useful idiots” (especially journalists) through the elite universities and into high governmental positions.

The U.S.S.R. may be gone, but its handiwork lives on, and the struggle for the soul of the West that Marx began in London continues.

Your thoughts welcome here.

You know who you are. From the New York Times a year ago:

Republicans have long accused mainstream journalists of being on the payroll of President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, a common refrain of favoritism, especially from those on the losing end of an election.

But this year the accusation has a new twist: In some notable cases it has become true, with several prominent journalists now on the payrolls of Obama and Democratic congressional leaders.

An unusual number of journalists from prominent, mainstream organizations started new government jobs in January, providing new kindling to the debate over whether Obama is receiving unusually favorable treatment in the news media.

The number is now up to fourteen.

This will end well, sure it will. After all, when you sell out your journalistic integrity to a cause, what could possibly go wrong? (more…)