A Florida congresswoman has joined five former U.S.
diplomats in publicly urging President-elect Donald Trump to rescind
President Obama’s recent directive that U.S. intelligence agencies share
information with Cuba’s government.
Opponents, meantime, are defending the October 2016 directive.
The provisions on intelligence sharing were part of a
12-page directive Obama issued in October on trade and travel to Cuba.
It instructs the U.S. director of national intelligence, the Department
of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to cooperate and share
information with counterparts in Cuba on drug trafficking, immigration
and counterterrorism.
Last week, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla.,
sent a letter to Trump asking him to rescind the intelligence-sharing directives, according to the Miami Herald.
Ros-Lehtinen, who sits on the House Foreign Relations Committee, told FoxNews.com that such action was urgent.
"Any intelligence sharing with the Castro regime
should cease as soon as the new administration takes power,” she said.
“Sharing information with an avowed enemy of U.S. harms our national
security interests because the Cuban regime has an advanced espionage
apparatus that sells our intelligence to our adversaries across the
world.”
The Cuban “dictatorship cannot be trusted with any
kind of information,” she said, “and instead has developed strong ties
with countries like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran who want to use
Cuba as a launching pad for their spying capabilities against our
nation.”
Ros-Lehtinen’s letter follows
a Dec. 22 letter to Trump from five former U.S. diplomats
– Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, James Cason, Everett Briggs and Jose
Sorzano – that said the Cuban regime, which the U.S. long had included
on a list of countries that sponsor terrorism, cannot be trusted and
intelligence should not be shared with Havana.
Meanwhile, supporters of Obama’s directive say it is a
practical step that merely extends an existing policy on ways to fight
terrorism and drug trafficking.
William M. LeoGrande, a professor of government at
American University and co-author of “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden
History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana,” told FoxNews.com
that U.S.-Cuba intelligence sharing is not new and has existed for
decades in areas such as immigration and fighting drug trafficking.
“For many years, it was a relatively low level of
cooperation, on a case-by-case basis,” LeoGrande said. “If the U.S.
Coast Guard spotted a trafficker with a plane or boat, going into Cuban
airspace or waters, they’d contact the Cuban Coast Guard and cooperate
with them in interdicting, and vice versa.”
Critics of expanded cooperation between the two
countries, LeoGrande said, have a broader agenda of dismantling the
renewed diplomatic ties.
“They’re overblowing it because they’re opposed to
every aspect of normalizing relations,” he said. “There’s really no
downside to this [sharing]. One has to trust the intelligence community
to decide what things are too sensitive to share, and what things are
not.”