Missing U.S. Missile Shows Up in Cuba

[Ryan Ruck]

Missing U.S. Missile Shows Up in Cuba

Inert Hellfire missile sent to Europe for a training exercise makes mysterious trip, sparking concerns over loss of military technology

January 6, 2016

An inert U.S. Hellfire missile sent to Europe for training purposes was wrongly shipped from there to Cuba in 2014, said people familiar with the matter, a loss of sensitive military technology that ranks among the worst-known incidents of its kind.

The unintended delivery of the missile to Cuba has confounded investigators and experts who work in a regulatory system designed to prevent precisely such equipment from falling into the wrong hands, said those familiar with the matter.

For more than a year, amid a historic thawing of relations between the U.S. and Cuba, American authorities have tried to get the Cuban government to return the missile, said people familiar with the matter. At the same time, federal investigators have been tracing the paper trail of the wayward Hellfire to determine if its arrival in Cuba was the work of criminals or spies, or the result of a series of blunders, these people said.

Hellfires are air-to-ground missiles, often fired from helicopters. They were first designed as antitank weapons decades ago, but have been modernized to become an important part of the U.S. government’s antiterrorism arsenal, often fired from Predator drones to carry out lethal attacks on targets in countries including Yemen and Pakistan, said people familiar with the technology.

This particular missile didn’t contain explosives, but U.S. officials worry that Cuba could share the sensors and targeting technology inside it with nations like China, North Korea or Russia, these people said. Officials don’t suspect Cuba is likely to try to take apart the missile on its own and try to develop similar weapons technology, these people said. It is unclear whether a U.S. adversary has ever obtained such knowledge of a Hellfire.

U.S. officials said the case of the missing missile, while highly unusual, points to long-standing concerns about the security of international commercial shipping and the difficulty of keeping close tabs on important items.

“Did someone take a bribe to send it somewhere else? Was it an intelligence operation, or just a series of mistakes? That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out,” said one U.S. official.

The government response to the missing missile has been two-pronged. First, it has tried to get the missile back. Second, officials want to determine who, if anyone, intentionally sent it off course. That effort has gone slowly, the people familiar with the probe said, in large part because the most important clues are in Europe, where evidence-gathering is subject to transnational diplomatic requests that can take years to complete.

The missile was sent from Orlando International Airport in early 2014 to be used in a North Atlantic Treaty Organization military exercise, said the people familiar with the case. As with other sensitive military gear, the shipping crate was clearly marked as containing material subject to rigorous export controls, and that shipping information would have made clear to anyone handling it that it wasn’t regular cargo, these people said.

The missile was sent by its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin Corp. , after the company got permission from the State Department, which oversees the sharing of sensitive military technology with allies.

A Lockheed Martin spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter, referring queries to U.S. government officials.

The people familiar with the case said the missile was sent to Spain and used in the military exercise. But for reasons that are still unclear, after it was packed up, it began a roundabout trip through Europe, was loaded onto a truck and eventually sent to Germany.

The missile was packaged in Rota, Spain, a U.S. official said, where it was put into the truck belonging to another freight-shipping firm, known by officials who track such cargo as a “freight forwarder.” That trucking company released the missile to yet another shipping firm that was supposed to put the missile on a flight originating in Madrid. That flight was headed to Frankfurt, Germany, before it was to be placed on another flight bound for Florida.

At some point, officials loading the first flight realized the missile it expected to be loading onto the aircraft wasn’t among the cargo, the government official said. After tracing the cargo, officials realized that the missile had been loaded onto a truck operated by Air France, which took the missile to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. There, it was loaded onto a “mixed pallet” of cargo and placed on an Air France flight. By the time the freight-forwarding firm in Madrid tracked down the missile, it was on the Air France flight, headed to Havana.

Attempts to reach Air France were unsuccessful.

When the plane landed in Havana, a local official spotted the labeling on the shipping crate and seized it, people familiar with the case said. Around June 2014, Lockheed Martin officials realized the missile was missing, was likely in Cuba, and notified the State Department, said those familiar with the matter. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether the redirection of the missile was a crime.

Several of those familiar with the case said the loss of the Hellfire missile is the worst example they can recall of the kind of missteps that can occur in international shipping of sensitive military technology. While there are instances in which sensitive technology ends up getting lost in transit, it is virtually unheard of for such a shipment to end up in a sanctioned country like Cuba, according to industry experts.

Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, said it is likely some foreign nations would like to reverse-engineer parts of a Hellfire, such as the sensors or targeting technology, to develop countermeasures or to improve their own missile systems.

“Now it’s a proliferation concern—someone else now understands how it works and what may have been cutting edge for us is deconstructed and packaged into what other players sell on the open market—and possibly provided to countries that we wouldn’t sell to,” said Mr. Singer.

The Defense Department’s Joint Attack Munitions Systems project office asked officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency to provide an assessment of the security impacts of the lost munition to determine the risks associated with its loss. An official at DIA declined to comment. But a defense official confirmed that DIA has reviewed the implications of the lost missile.

The Cuban Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to multiple messages seeking comment. Representatives at the embassies of Spain and France didn’t immediately comment, while attempts to contact the German Embassy were unsuccessful.

Several officials and industry experts said what was most baffling about the case was how so many shipping-company workers who should have noticed the labeling on the shipping crate and—at a minimum— asked questions about why it was going somewhere else apparently allowed it to proceed along a circuitous route until it ended up in Cuba.

If someone intentionally sent it astray, that could constitute a violation of the Arms Export Control Act, as well as a possible violation of Cuban sanctions laws. There are more than 25 countries to which U.S. military exports are generally prohibited. Cuba was added to the list in 1984.

The State Department’s office of Political-Military Affairs, which oversees exports of military hardware, regularly finds companies to be in violation of the Arms Export Control Act for a variety of reasons. Each year, there are about 1,500 disclosures of potential violations to the Arms Export Control Act. Many of those violations are because of mis-shipments, said a State Department official, but the official said the government doesn’t track the specific number each year.

“Mis-shipments happen all the time because of the amount and volume of the defense trade,” the official added. But no official could recall an instance when a U.S. missile was sent to a sanctioned nation.

The Hellfire missile has been missing during the most sensitive time in U.S.-Cuba relations in more than a generation. In June 2014, when the U.S. first realized the missile was in Cuba, the State Department was engaged in secret negotiations to normalize relations with Cuba, ending a standoff dating back to the 1950s.

That rapprochement culminated in a December 2014 announcement that the two nations would normalize relations, re-establish embassies and exchange prisoners.

If it turns out that the Hellfire was lost because of human error, the criminal probe would end and the State Department would have to determine whether to pursue a settlement with Lockheed Martin over the incident.

Companies that violate export-control laws can be fined millions of dollars and be required to address whatever issues contributed to the problem, the State Department official said. Large defense firms like Northrop Grumman Corp. and Boeing Co. have entered into consent agreements over the years, according to the State Department. Lockheed Martin has been cited in the past by State, including in 2000 and 2008 for a total of 16 violations. In another instance, another defense company, BAE Systems PLC, paid the Treasury $79 million in 2011, the highest amount ever paid. Lockheed Martin, which voluntarily disclosed the missing missile, is cooperating with investigators, U.S. officials said.

“This is a complicated business, mistakes are inherent in complicated businesses,” the official said. “Mistakes are a part of any human endeavor. Mistakes are made.”

Accidental?

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Accidental?

Companion Threads:

• Obama will bring Cuba in from the Cold
• Senator Dianne Feinstein's link to Cuba
• Honduran Military Ousts President Ahead Of Vote
• Obama backing would-be dictator in Honduras
• What Would a Communist Do?

Obama’s Bailout for Communist Dictators

December 18, 2014 by Daniel Greenfield 7 Comments



The Soviet Union did not have to fall. If Carter had won a second term and Mondale had succeeded him, the Communist dictatorship might have received the outside help it needed to survive.

And we would still be living under the shadow of the Cold War.

Carter couldn’t save the Soviet Union, but he did his best to save Castro, visiting Fidel and Raul in Cuba where the second worst president in American history described his meeting with Castro as a greeting among “old friends”.

Raul Castro called Carter “the best of all U.S. presidents.”

Obama’s dirty deal with Raul will make the worst president in American history, Castro’s new best friend.

Carter couldn’t save Castro, but Obama did. This was not a prisoner exchange. This was a Communist bailout.

Obama boasted that he would increase the flow of money to Cuba from businesses, from bank accounts and from trade. When he said, “We’re significantly increasing the amount of money that can be sent to Cuba”, that was his real mission statement.

The Castro regime is on its last legs. Its sponsors in Moscow and Caracas are going bankrupt due to failing energy prices. The last hope of the Butcher of Havana was a bailout from Washington D.C.

And that’s exactly what Obama gave him.

Obama has protected the Castros from regime change as if Communist dictators are an endangered species.

From the beginning, Obama put his foreign policy at the disposal of Havana when he backed Honduran leftist thug Manuel Zelaya’s attempt to shred its Constitution over the protests of the country’s Congress and Supreme Court. And its military, which refused to obey his illegal orders.

Obama’s support for an elected dictator in Honduras should have warned Americans that their newly elected leader viewed men like Zelaya favorably and constitutions and the separation of powers between the branches of government unfavorably. It also showcased his agenda for Latin America.

His embrace of Raul Castro brings that agenda out into the open even if he still insists in wrapping it in dishonest claims about “freedom” and “openness” while bailing out a Communist dictatorship.

Obama began his Castro speech with a lie, declaring, “The United States of America is changing its relationship with the people of Cuba.”

The Cuban people have no relationship with the United States because they have no free elections and no say in how they are governed. The only Cubans who have a relationship with the United States fled here on rafts.

Obama did not make his dirty deal with the Cuban people. He made it in a marathon phone call with the Cuban dictator.

When Obama claims that his deal with Raul Castro represents a new relationship with the people of Cuba, he is endorsing a Communist dictatorship as the legitimate representative of the Cuban people.

This is a retroactive endorsement of the Castro regime and its entire history of mass murder and political terror. Obama is not trying to “open up” Cuba as he claimed. He likes Cuba just the way it is; Communist and closed.

Obama did not consult the Cuban people, just as he did not consult the American people. He disregarded the embargo, Congress, the Constitution and the freedom of the Cuban people.

His dictatorial disregard of the embargo, which can only be eliminated by Congress, in order to support a dictatorship, is a disturbing reminder that the road he is walking down leads to a miserable tyranny.

Cuban-American senators from both parties have been unanimous in condemning the move. These senators are the closest thing to Cuban elected officials.
But Obama disregarded Senator Menendez, a man of his own party, Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Ted Cruz.

Instead Obama chose to stand with Raul Castro and his Communist dictatorship.

Obama tried to whitewash his crime by exploiting Alan Gross, a USAID contractor who was imprisoned and abused by the Castro regime, as if the release of an American hostage justified helping the men holding him hostage stay in power. And the media, which was reprinting Castro’s propaganda claiming that Gross’ imprisonment was justified, is busy now pretending that it cares about his release.

He had similarly tried to whitewash his Taliban amnesty by using Bergdahl and his parents as cover. If a deal is struck with Iran, the release of Robert Levinson, Saeed Abedini or Amir Hekmati will almost certainly be used to divert attention from the fact that their own government has collaborated with the thugs and terrorists who took them hostage.

Even though Obama criticized European countries for paying financial ransoms to ISIS, his own ransom paid to the Castros is worth countless billions. And the blood money pouring out of American banks into the Castro regime will encourage other dictatorships to take Americans hostage as leverage for obtaining concessions from the United States. Americans abroad will suffer for Obama’s dirty deal.

No European country recognized ISIS in exchange for the release of hostages. Only Obama was willing to go that far with Cuba, not only opening diplomatic and economic relations, but promising to remove the Communist dictatorship from the list of state sponsors of terror despite the fact that the last State Department review found that Cuba continued to support the leftist narco-terrorists of FARC.

FARC had taken its own American hostages who were starved and beaten, tortured and abused.

Now Obama has given in to the demand of a state sponsor of terror to be removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for releasing a hostage.

Obama has sent a message to Iran that the best way to secure a deal is by wrapping it in an American hostage. He has told ISIS that we do negotiate with terrorists. And he has once again demonstrated that his vaunted “smart power” is nothing more than appeasement wrapped in excuses and lies.

But Obama did not act to help Alan Gross. He did not even act because he genuinely thought that diplomatic relations would open up Cuba. In his speech, Obama used the claim commonly put forward by Castro apologists that the very fact that the Castros were still in power proved that sanctions had failed.
Yet the lack of sanctions against Cuba by the rest of the world certainly did not usher in the new spirit of openness that Obama is promising. Rewarding dictators with cash never frees a nation.

This was not about saving Alan Gross. It was about saving Raul Castro.

Obama and Castro are both weakened leaders of the left. Like the Castros, Obama has lost international influence and his own people have turned on him. The only thing he has left is unilateral rule.

If Obama saw something of his own hopes and aspirations to engage in a populist transformation of the United States in Manuel Zelaya or Hugo Chavez, his horizons have narrowed down to those of Raul Castro. His ability to remake the world has vanished and the American people are revolting against his collectivization efforts. They want open health care markets, free speech and honest government.

Obama can no longer remake the Middle East, he certainly can’t bring the Soviet Union back from the dead, but he could still bail out Raul Castro and maintain Communist rule in Cuba.

No matter how often Obama claims to be “on the right side of history”, the Castros are a living reminder that to be on the left is to be on the wrong side of history.

Obama did not want to see the “Berlin Wall” fall in Havana on his watch. After watching his own grip on the United States collapse, he did not want to see the left fail again.

We can never know how history might have been different if Carter had gotten a second term or if Mondale had replaced Reagan. But Obama’s deal with Castro reminds us that the end of the USSR was not inevitable. It happened because we stood up against the tyrants in the Kremlin and their useful idiots in the White House.

A good man like Reagan could make a difference by bringing down the USSR. A bad man like Obama can make a difference by keeping Cuba Communist.

[American Patriot]

That wasn't accidental. No matter what anyone thinks. Someone in Obama's Administration transferred that technology to the Russians. Yeah, Cuba got it, but you KNOW the Russians were all over it.

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State Dept Will Not Deny They Sold Hellfire Missile To Cuba

Update to this story.

Via The Blaze:



One day after the Wall Street Journal revealed that a dummy U.S. hellfire missile was mistakenly shipped from Europe to Cuba in 2014, the State Department refuses to deny whether or not it was sold to the Cuban government.

“I am restricted, under federal law and regulations, from commenting on the specific defense trade, licensing cases and compliance matters,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said during a press conference Friday.

Read interesting comments...

Breaking: US Enemy Cuba Caught Stealing Ultra-Sophisticated US Missile Technology for Sale to Other US Enemies

Humberto Fontova | Jan 08, 2016



Actually that’s not the title of yesterday’s blockbuster report in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s the WSJ title: “Missing U.S. Missile Shows Up in Cuba.”
“An inert U.S. Hellfire missile sent to Europe (Spain) for training purposes was wrongly shipped from there to Cuba in 2014,” continues the WSJ, “a loss of sensitive military technology that ranks among the worst-known incidents of its kind.

The unintended delivery of the missile to Cuba has confounded investigators and experts who work in a regulatory system designed to prevent precisely such equipment from falling into the wrong hands… Investigators are unclear if the incident was an error or the result of espionage.

For more than a year, amid a historic thawing of relations between the U.S. and Cuba, American authorities have tried to get the Cuban government to return the missile.”

“Cuban officials are reportedly convulsed in guffaws very similar to their guffaws in response to the request by Obama officials for the return of some of the FBI’s most-wanted criminals who live like celebrities in Cuba. The hilarity displayed by Cuban officials in the face of sweating Obama administration officials reportedly also caused spittle to actually splatter the shaken U.S. officials when they meekly inquired about the return of the $7 billion Castro stole at Soviet gunpoint from U.S. citizens in 1960.

“All of this hilarity and truculence by Cuban officials in the face of Obama’s officials comes despite the flood of U.S. dollars to Cuba resulting from Obama’s recent “rapprochement” with the Castro regime. This U.S. economic lifeline was estimated at over $5 billion last year-- which amounts to more than what the Soviets pumped into Castro’s fiefdom annually at the height of their sponsorship.

“Better still, Obama threw the Castro brothers this economic lifeline in the very nick of time--just as their subsidies from Venezuela threatened to dry up. None of these factors stopped Castro’s apparatchiks from openly laughing in the faces of Obama’s groveling officials—indeed they made the guffaws all the louder. ”

Ok, Ok, the WSJ story obviously didn’t contain the second, third and fourth paragraphs above. But any semi-sane Cuba-watcher can easily visualize the incident.

The formerly missing missile, known as a Hellfire is a laser-guided, air-to-surface missile often fired from Apache attack helicopters and Predator Drones and has become “ an important part of the U.S. government’s antiterrorism arsenal,” according to the WSJ. In other words, it’s a hot item to get their hands for everyone from ISIS to Iran and from Syria to the Taliban.

Let’s play a fun game and see if you concur with my choice for article title. The game is called “Connecting Da Dots.” Here’s some of the dots:

"Cuba is intelligence trafficker to the world," stresses Lieut. Col. Chris Simmons, recently retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency and widely hailed as America’s top Cuba spycatcher. “Among many others, the U.S. military secrets stolen by Castro’s spies have been sold to former regimes in Iraq, Panama and Grenada, alerting these dictatorships to U.S. military plans against them and costing untold American lives.”

Retired Lt. Col. Chris Simmons helped uncover 14 Cuban spies, including Castro’s master-spy Ana Belen Montes, who today serves a 25 year prison sentence after conviction in 2002 for the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Defense Department in modern history. In brief, Simmons knows what he’s talking about.

The Hellfire missile’s Excellent Adventure began in Orlando International airport where its manufacturer Lockheed-Martin shipped it to Spain for a NATO training exercise at the ROTA military base in southern Spain. From there it took “a somewhat roundabout journey through Spain,” continues the WSJ story, “Germany and France before winding up at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. From there, it was supposed to have been shipped back to Florida; instead, it was loaded onto an Air France flight to Havana.”

OK, here’s a few more dots:

“In the most serious espionage case yet uncovered in Spain, prosecutors have charged five members of Spanish military intelligence and a businessman of spying for the Cuban government…Cuba's Intelligence Directorate moved its main European base to Madrid in the early 1990s.” (Miami Herald Jan. 19, 1999.)
“Cuban Intelligence (the DI) reportedly had 150 officers in Spain—considerably more than any NATO country had in the Spanish capital at the time. In addition to spying on NATO military forces, the DI was responsible for acquiring American technology denied to Cuba under the U.S. embargo.” (The National Interest, Sept. 29, 2013.)

“U.S. intelligence specialists have long assumed that Cuba provides other countries in the anti-U.S. firmament—such as Iran, China, and North Korea—with information, including commercial and technical data. (The National Interest, Sept. 29, 2013.)

“As we learned from Cuba's attempt to smuggle 240 tons of weapons -- including ballistic missile technology -- to North Korea in mid-2013, the Castros are more than willing to share such weapons, information and technology with other rogue actors.” (Capitol Hill Cubans, Jan. 7, 2016.)

But here’s what really galls: as early as June 2014 U.S. officials learned that the terror-sponsoring Castro brothers had hold of our missile. Obama’s officials were in hush-hush “negotiations” with Castro’s KGB-trained apparatchiks at that very time. And as mentioned, those “negotiations” possibly saved the Castro regime from bankruptcy.

And yet not only does the missile remain in Cuba—but Obama also removed Cuba from the State Department’s official list of terror sponsors!.... “The Art of the Deal”—INDEED!

“Mistakes are inherent in complicated businesses,” the WSJ quotes a U.S. official in closing. “Mistakes are a part of any human endeavor. Mistakes are made.”

Indeed, “U.S. official.” And when it comes to U.S. officials and Castro’s Cuba, some of those mistakes can be real doozies. To wit:

“We’ve infiltrated Castro’s guerrilla group in the Sierra Mountains. The Castro brothers and Ernesto “Che” Guevara have no affiliations with any Communists whatsoever.” (Havana CIA station chief Jim Noel , Nov. 1958.)

“Fidel Castro is not only NOT a communist –he’s a strong ANTI-Communist fighter. He’s ready to help us in the hemisphere’s anti-communist fight and we should share our intelligence with him. “(CIA Cuba expert” Frank Bender, April, 1959.)

“Nothing but refugee rumors. Nothing in Cuba presents a threat to the United States. There’s no likelihood that the Soviets or Cubans would try and install an offensive capability (missiles) in Cuba.” (JFK’s sneering National Security advisor, McGeorge Bundy on ABC’s Issues and Answers on October 14, 1962.)