The New York Times documented back in 1977 how Communist Cuba influenced members of the anti-war Students for a Democrat Society into forming the American terrorist group Weather Underground, and then helped them conduct covert activities via its Embassies in New York and Cuba.
Quoting a then-newly released report from the FBI, The Times writes that North Vietnamese and Cuban officials began influencing S.D.S. members in extreme antiwar strategy through foreign meetings held in Communist countries, including Hungary, Czechoslovakia and North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese, according to S.D.S. literature of the time, had suggested that the antiwar movement needed not just intellectual protesters but also physically rugged recruits.
The conduit for contact in the United States was a group of intelligence agents assigned to the staff of the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York. These agents arranged for American youths to be inculcated with revolutionary fervor and, occasionally, to be trained in practical weaponry by Cuban military officers through the so-called Venceremos Brigades.
After the Weathermen went “underground” in 1970 and many of them were being sought by the F.B.I. on criminal charges, Cuban intelligence officers were in touch with them from both the New York mission and the Cuban Embassy in Canada.
Cuban officials helped several Weather Underground adherents who feared arrest in the United States to travel to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and then to reenter the United Slates surreptitiously.
Four Weathermen who had been in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigades were sent back to the United States through Czechoslovakia rather than through Canada with other brigade members to lessen their chances of being arrested by American authorities. The four wanted to get back to the United States safely after the explosion of a house in Greenwich Village killed two members of the Weather group, Dianna Oughton and Ted Gold, and the Cubans “obliged” them by making the European travel arrangements, an FBI report quoted by the New York Times, said. The report did not say if one of the four smuggled in via Czechoslovakia was Bill Ayers.
“In February 1970, leading WUO member Bill Ayers told fellow underground WUO member Larry Grathwohl that if communication could not be made through these Canadian numbers, an individual should get in touch with the Cuban Embassy in Canada in order to establish contact with other members of the WUO,” the report said.
“To do this an individual should use the code name ‘Delgado’ when referring to himself and the person with whom he desired to make contact,” it said.
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