When I first posted about the Hellfire missile the Obama administration shipped to Cuba (which the White House doesn’t deny it sold), I said that I’ll leave it to the military analysts to clarify the importance and magnitude of such security breach. Here’s Mary O’Grady’s WSJ column,
North Korea’s Cuban Friends. The Castro boys now have a U.S. Hellfire missile to share with Kim Jong Un.
On Friday Wall Street Journal reporters Devlin Barrett and Gordon Lubold broke the story that the State Department became aware in June 2014 that a Hellfire missile had gone missing and that it was “likely in Cuba.”
Let’s face it: That was no shipping error, as some have speculated. Stealing weapons technology is what spies do for a living, and getting hold of a sophisticated piece of U.S. equipment is a major coup for Havana.
It is not a stretch to think that the regime will share, for a price, everything there is to know about the laser-guided, air-to-surface Hellfire—which can be launched from a helicopter or drone as well as from a plane—with its good friends Iran, Russia and North Korea, and even with other terrorist organizations.
President Obama seems to think that the Castros have abandoned their revolutionary obsession with harming the U.S. The theft of the Hellfire would have disabused even Chauncey Gardiner of such naiveté.
If it was theft, that is.
But not Mr. Obama. He was already engaged in a rapprochement with the regime when the State Department learned that Havana had the missile. If he issued an ultimatum that it be returned, his talks might have collapsed.
So six months later he went ahead with his plan to throw a lifeline to the economically struggling Castros by restoring diplomatic relations and liberalizing American travel to the island. In May Cuba was removed from the State Department’s list of state-sponsors of terrorism.
The missile is only the latest example of the no good that Cuba is still up to. In July 2013 Panama Canal authorities discovered 240 metric tons of weapons—including jet fighters and missiles—hidden under a sugar shipment aboard a North Korean ship that had sailed from Cuba and was bound for North Korea.
Read the whole thing.
