ALVIN SNYDER

Warriors of Disinformation
Chapter 13, The Caudillo of Miami

At 1:00 P.M. Sunday afternoon, August 6, 1989, a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft on a secret mission took off from Homestead Air Force Base in southern Florida in the direction of Cuba. It flew along the 23 degree 30 north latitude line, about 25 statute miles north of Havana. The plane's crew aimed its sensitive electronic devices at the Cuban capital, then swung them over to the east toward Matanzas and Santa Clara provinces, and finally around to the west and Pinar del Rio. After dark, Coast Guard cutters from the Florida Keys cruised so close to Cuba's shore that the crew could see street lights along Havana's boulevards. The cutters circled the entire island of Cuba, homing in on their targets. From Powder Springs, Georgia, and from Alligator Alley, Marathon, Turtle Key, and Key West in Florida, high-powered electronic eavesdropping devices drew beads on various sites inside Cuba. Not since the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs invasion of the early 1960s had so intensive an American reconnaissance effort been aimed at the Communist nation.
An invasion was only months away. But this time, troops would not land at the Bay of Pigs or anywhere else on the island. No blood would be shed. The invaders would be American television programs. The ships and planes and spy stations were monitoring Cuban television and measuring its capacity with field-strength meters, spectrum analyzers, and waveform monitors to determine how a TV signal beamed from Washington could best penetrate homes in Havana. In essence, we were preparing an electronic Bay of Pigs, an invasion of music videos, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," and "Alf," all of which would enlighten the masses in Cuba about the virtues of democracy and motivate them to kick out Castro. The figure behind all this effort, Jorge Mas Canosa, a resident of Miami, was planning to become the next president of Cuba, with the help of the American taxpayer."

Chapter 4, The Five-Minute Tape Gap

(My Deputy, Richard Levy, and I were preparing the videotape that would be shown at the United Nations Security Council, depicting how a Soviet fighter pilot had shot down Korean Airlines flight 007, killing all 269 passengers aboard. We were working with a clandestine audio tape of the Russian pilot as he downed the plane, and we were fashioning this into a video).

"It was midnight Sunday, and in our Washington studios Russian-language experts continued to pore over the translated transcripts to check their accuracy. At one point in the morning we were ready to produce our videotape, and the tape machines started to roll. About an hour later, Levy and I went to my office to meet with intelligence officers from the Air Force, who, we were told, were sent "just in case we had any questions." I suspected they were actually from the National Security Agency, which, together with Japanese military intelligence, had recorded and provided the tape of the Russian fighter pilots to the State Department. There were three men in my office, an Air Force colonel in uniform and two others in civilian clothes. They seemed particularly interested in a map we were preparing, which showed the flight path of the RC-135 (Air Force reconnaissance plane). It was the only map we would use in our videotape presentation.

The Soviets had still not admitted shooting down the Korean airliner and were simultaneously insisting that the RC-135 was similar in appearance to the KE-007 and could have been mistaken for it. We had decided our tape should start with a map showing the flight path of the RC-135, indicating where it had already landed - 1,200 miles away from where KE-007 was shot down. We got the RC-135's flight information from the Pentagon. Its flight path was illustrated on a large map in my office, the one we would incorporate into the videotape. One of the men in civilian clothes peered at the map.
"The RC-135 flight path is wrong, said the man with the mustache and open-collar, short-sleeved sport shirt
"That's what we were told," said Levy. We got it from the Air Force,"
"I don't care whre you got it. It's wrong," the man insisted.
"So who are you?" I asked.
"Just call me John," the man answered.
"How do you know this is wrong, John?" inquired Levy.
"Because I was on the plane," said John. "Don't worry. I'll get what you need."
A couple of hours later, we received two beautiful, professionally-mounted four-color maps by courier. We were also provided with poster-size photographs of the Soviet interceptor planes with all their technical specifications, which we would take to New York with us to display at (Ambassador) Kirkpatrick's news conference at the U.S. Mission following our Security Council extravaganza."