Fidel Castro: 'The ultimate spymaster'

Brian Latell worked in U.S. intelligence for 30 years, principally as the chief analyst at the CIA on the Cuba desk, tracking revolutionary leader Fidel Castro's every move.

What he didn't know at the time was that Castro was doing the same, and had Latell under close watch, sending spies to infiltrate classes he taught at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

"Fidel and I kind of tracked eachother," said Latell, who retired from the agency in 1998. "My job was to get into his boots, to understand, to estimate and predict him."

"Once he got wind of me in the early 1970s, then he started tracking me," he said in an interview with Univision.

The Cuban intelligence service sent students to infiltrate Latell's classes. "They took notes and reported back to Fidel what I was saying about him," he added.

Latell's new ebook, 'History Will Absolve Me: Fidel Castro: Life and Legacy', explores the diverse opinions of the former leader. Long in the works, Latell published the book Saturday morning, mere hours after Castro's death at age 90.

Latell seeks to remain objective, noting that many in Latin America admired Castro for overthrowing Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1958 and boldly taking on the United States. "Most readers I think will be less kind when they read about some of the heinous and violent things he did including during the (1962) missile crisis when he advocated a nuclear holocaust," he said.

Latell began watching Cuba in the mid-1960s and served as U.S. National Intelligence Officer for Latin America. Not surprisingly, his most fascinating insights relate to the U.S.-Cuba spy wars.

Part memoir, Latell dips into his own examination of Castro over many years, contrasting the leader's appeal among the poor masses in Latin America with his failed economic policies and repressive domestic tactics. While some details cast Castro in a poor light, the U.S. government does not come off much better. Latell credits Castro with outsmarting U.S. intelligence and flipping the CIA's own Cuban agents to spy for him in some 50 cases.

"It was tremendously embarassing for the CIA," he said.

Throughout his 48 years in power Castro was "a supreme, unchallenged spymaster," said Latell, who now works at Florida International University in Miami.

"He was at the top of every major spy case calling the shots. It was really unprecedented. What other leader of a nation in modern times has unofficially, served as the nation's spymaster? He was a born conspirator, pursuing conspiracies and fomenting conspiracies."

It was not until June 1987, when Cuban spy Florentino Aspillaga defected to the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, blind-siding U.S. intelligence services, that the CIA learned how badly it had been duped.

In his previous book, 'Castro's Secrets, the CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine,' Latell wrote extensively about how Castro survived several well-documented assassination attempts. Even though the CIA stepped up its counter-intelligence operations regarding Cuba in the last two decades, the Cubans continued to enjoy some notable successes, Latell notes. Among them: Ana Belen Montes, a Cuban mole at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, who was arrested in 2001.

After Fidel Castro's death Latell expects little to change in the short to midterm. He predicts the Cuban military will continue to acquire greater influence and wealth through large tourism and real estate holding companies.

While some analysts have compared Cuba's evolution to China's state capitalist model, Latell said Vladimir Putin's Russia is perhaps a better example, given the Russian leader's background as a KGB intelligence officer.

"You could have the same thing in Cuba - without democracy," he added.