(The Guardian)
Mexican Spy Has No Regrets
Thursday April 6, 2000 8:10 pm
MEXICO CITY (AP) - Tall, white-haired and friendly, Gilberto Lopez y Rivas is a noted anthropologist and prominent congressman, a member of a commission trying to end the Zapatista rebellion in southern Mexico.
But for the last 22 years he has guarded a secret: Lopez spied on the United States for Soviet military intelligence, passing on secrets for a decade until the FBI caught up with him and quietly forced him back to Mexico.
Now that a new book has uncovered that past, Lopez freely admits he was a spy, but says that he did it for convictions, not money.
``We don't regret anything in that historical moment in which we lived. It was an option of struggle. We did nothing of which we would be ashamed,'' Lopez told The Associated Press.
David Wise, author of the newly published book ``Cassidy's Run,'' said Lopez was one of at least 10 Soviet agents exposed by U.S. Army Sgt. Joseph Cassidy, who spent more than 20 years as a double agent for the FBI.
Tipped by Cassidy, FBI agents photographed Lopez acting as a courier for miniaturized documents left by the double agent. They began a close watch on his life as a graduate student in Utah and Texas and later as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.
Lopez was fortunate.
When the FBI confronted him in June 1978, he confessed and was left him alone briefly with his wife and children after they promised not to commit suicide. He assumed he would be sent to jail.
``It was a very painful scene,'' Lopez said. ``Only scruples of U.S. democracy, which are to be admired, blocked our imprisonment.''
Wise said concern about the legality of the surveillance used to trap the Lopezes, which included cameras planted in their home, led the Justice Department to decide it could not prosecute them.
``At that moment we thought it was a trap setting us free,'' Lopez said. ``We thought what they are going to do is make an attempt on our lives.''
Lopez, his wife and children fled to Mexico and began a new, more public life. In 1997 he was elected to Mexico's congress for the leftist Democratic Revolution Party. His term ends this year.
The revelation in Wise's book was reported Tuesday in the Mexico City newspaper El Universal - not that it seemed to bother many in a country where the United States is an often-troublesome neighbor and where many politicians dabbled in the radical fringes of politics as youths.
Lopez said four or five people congratulated him after seeing the article.
According to ``Cassidy's Run,'' published in March, FBI agent Aurelio Flores befriended Lopez and even baby-sat for his children. But Lopez denies claims he tried to recruit Flores for Soviet intelligence.
Lopez, who declined to speak with Wise before the book was published, said his activity included observation and intelligence tasks. He didn't describe them in depth.
Lopez complained that the book exaggerated how much money he received for his work and that it wrongly portrays him as having a ``fanatical hatred'' of Americans. ``That is absolutely false... We had excellent friends in our stay in the United States.''
Lopez, born in 1943, came of age as the Cuban Revolution triumphed. He said he had ``a very fundamental conviction that socialism was possible in Latin America.''
As a youth, he joined an abortive armed group, was stunned by the death of Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara in a failed Bolivian revolt and said he was at Tlatelolco plaza in Mexico City in 1968 when the Mexican army massacred student demonstrators.
``I think that times have changed, and it is hard to understand what it was to speak of anti-imperialism,'' he said. ``It was a very black-and-white time, really. There was no room for subtleties. We did not know all of what was going on in the Soviet Union.''
Lopez said that in December 1968, he made the first of several trips to Moscow, where he was trained by Soviet military intelligence, the GRU.
He returned to Mexico, where he did a master's degree thesis on Chicanos and later earned a doctorate at the University of Utah. But the principal work, he said, was always intelligence.
While in Utah he attracted FBI attention that never flagged. Wise said Flores even followed him from Utah to the University of Texas.
After returning for a brief time to Mexico, he went to Minnesota, where two FBI agents died in a plane crash trying to follow his car on a trip to Canada.
After he was caught and forced to return to Mexico, he was named director of the National School of Anthropology and History and spent time in Nicaragua, becoming an adviser to the leftist Sandinista government.
He described the Soviet model of repressive socialism as ``a failure'' and said he wants peaceful change: ``I think we should convince, not conquer.'' But he remains convinced that capitalism creates ``blood, pain, tears.''
As a congressman, Lopez is on a commission mediating between the government and the Zapatista rebels, led by the ski-masked Subcomandante Marcos.
Now that his past is public, Lopez laughed about the next conversation he might have with Marcos.
``I will tell him that I too had a mask,'' he said.