WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., March 6 (UPI) -- Documents in Washington and Mexico City show that Mexico made a deal with the United States to use some officials in the Havana embassy to spy on Cuba during the Cold War.
In return, the United States agreed to maintain the image of Mexican government as revolutionary to keep leftist elements in that nation under control.
Findings by Kate Doyle, Mexico Project director for the Washington-based National Security Archive, were published this week by Mexico's Proceso magazine and posted on the Internet by the archive.
"This was a very secretive agreement. Mexico was making a deal with the U.S., (saying) 'We can help you, but need to keep this image of revolutionary vision so we can survive at home,'" Doyle told the Palm Beach Post for an article published Thursday.
During the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, the United States routinely criticized Mexico for maintaining diplomatic ties with Cuba after all the other countries in the Organization of American States broke off relations in 1964.
Declassified documents and taped presidential conversations showed that was a ruse, agreed by Mexican President Adolfo Lopez Mateos, and designed to mislead the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba.
A White House audiotape dated Nov. 12, 1964, records Secretary of State Dean Rusk telling Johnson that U.S. officials had agreed with the foreign ministers of several Latin American nations on the "practical desirability" of Mexico maintaining an embassy in Havana.
The United States pressed Mexico's ambassadors to Havana to secretly "communicate Cuban developments" to the United States.
A declassified State Department cable said at least one Mexican ambassador provided detailed intelligence to the United States in 1967 on Cuban troop movements, Soviet military cargo ships and economic intelligence. This intelligence was considered so important it was sent all the way up to the Oval Office.
President Mateos' PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party, lost Mexico's presidency in 2000 after 71 years.
Current President Vicente Fox has pursued a pro-United States policy. But now he is under pressure to defy the Bush administration as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, which is engaged in a debate over a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq.
