CIA sets up secret Cuba task force to increase pressure on Havana

HAVANA — The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has secretly established a Cuba task force, setting in motion plans for a more concerted campaign to intensify pressure on the Cuban government and expand intelligence operations targeting the island, US media reported on Wednesday.Citing people briefed on the move, the New York Times said the task force will enable the agency to quickly direct more financial, human and technical resources toward Cuba as part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to push for economic, political and leadership changes in Havana.The move coincides with stepped-up efforts by US intelligence agencies to get a better understanding of the situation on the ground inside Cuba.According to the report, the task force has begun adding case officers, intelligence analysts, cyber specialists and officers focused on covert influence operations.The report said the task force’s mandate is to create divisions within Cuba’s political elite in hope of encouraging the replacement of perceived as anti-American hard-liners with officials more amenable to Trump’s demands.In 1960, the CIA established an earlier Cuba task force, whose members oversaw the failed, agency-backed invasion of Cuba the next year known as the Bay of Pigs.“The intentions here are no surprise, since Cuba has long been the target of the CIA’s efforts at espionage, subversion and destabilization, including terrorism,” Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, said in a statement to The New York Times. “And yet the State Department has the audacity to call Cuba a threat for exercising its right to legitimate self-defense.”Unlike in the 1960s, when the earlier task force oversaw the training and equipping of a partner force of Cubans that launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, the current task force has no organized Cuban partners. The creation of the task force shows the extent to which the agency is preparing for what may be a protracted covert campaign against what has long been one of its hardest targets.