Miami’s Anti-Communist Insider Turns Convicted Foreign Agent
A former CIA station chief revered by Miami’s anti-Castro circles now faces prison as an unregistered foreign agent. His path from Cold War covert ops to selling secrets says a lot about the political machinery he came from.
A man waves a Cuban flag and a poster as Cuban Americans gather at the Orange Bowl in Miami, Florida, on March 2, 1996, to commemorate the four “Brothers to the Rescue” pilots, an anti-Castro organization based in Miami, who were shot down by the Cuban military. (Chris Bernacchi / AFP via Getty Images)
A retired CIA station chief was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison on November 20 for selling classified information he combed from top secret US government databases to Angola’s ruling elite.
In the 1980s, Dale Bendler was sent by the CIA to Angola to undermine Soviet and Cuban support of its Marxist national liberation movement. Four decades later, Bendler was convicted for failing to register as a foreign agent while peddling his security access to prominent People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) politicians following the party’s right-wing shift. Bendler’s conviction has made headlines, but most reporting about his murky dealings has failed to reveal his close ties to South Florida’s hardline Cuban American exile community.
Bendler was “beloved by Cuban anti-communist exiles in Miami,” once aiding the defection of Cuba’s top diplomat in Iran. He maintained a friendship with the infamous CIA agent who orchestrated the killing of Che Guevara and argued for tougher Cuba sanctions in op-eds and on TV. Bendler also held events featuring Cuban American lawmakers, former Trump administration officials, and GOP operatives tied to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.
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