Who's really "bad for America"?

In a recent interview CBS’s Ted Koppel denounced Sean Hannity as “bad for America” because “You have attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts.”

Well, CBS proudly claims Julia Sweig as a “CBS News Analyst.” And back in 2008 the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba spycatcher Lieut. Col. Chris Simmons (now retired), identified this very Julia Sweig as a full-fledged “agent of influence” for the Castro regime.

Any chance that an agent-of-influence for a totalitarian regime might “put ideology over facts?”

Any chance that an agent-of-influence for a mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring regime that came within a whisker of nuking America, whose agents managed the most damaging espionage against America in recent history, and whose dictator (only last year) declared America the “main enemy!”—any chance employing such a “news analyst” might be “bad for America?”

Important background: Sweig’s identifier Lieut. Col. Simmons helped end the operations of 80 enemy agents against America, some are today behind bars. One of these had managed the deepest penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in recent U.S. history. The spy’s name is Ana Belen Montes, known as “Castro’s Queen Jewel” in the intelligence community. “Montes passed some of our most sensitive information about Cuba back to Havana,” revealed then-undersecretary for International Security John Bolton.

Today she serves a 25-year sentence in federal prison. She was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, the same charge leveled against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, carrying the same potential death sentence for what is widely considered the most damaging espionage case since the “end” of the Cold War. Two years later, in 2003, Chris Simmons helped root out 14 Cuban spies who were promptly booted from the U.S.

In brief, retired Lt. Col. Chris Simmons knows what he’s talking about.

When Ted Koppel’s current CBS colleague Julia Sweig visited Cuba in 2010 accompanied by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, something caught Goldberg’s eye: “We shook hands,” he writes about the meeting with Fidel Castro. “Then he (Fidel Castro) greeted Julia warmly. They (Castro and Sweig) have known each other for more than 20 years.”

Indeed, Julia Sweig’s red carpet into totalitarian Cuba has been rolled out for decades. And as revealed by Vicente Botin who reported from Cuba for Madrid’s El Pais until he was booted from the Castro-family fiefdom for taking his job title seriously: “You (scholars and journalists) play the regime’s game and practice self–censorship or you’re gone.”

Yet Julia Sweig has been welcomed with open arms and much cheek-smooching to “research” and “report” from totalitarian Cuba for decades, and by some very interesting people:

Some very important background: Back in Nov. 17th 1962 J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI cracked a plot by Cuban terrorists that targeted defense installations along with Macy’s, Gimbals’, Bloomingdales, and Manhattan’s Grand Central Station with incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set for detonation the following week, on the day after Thanksgiving. Macy’s serves 50,000 shoppers on that one day.

Had those detonators gone off, 9⁄ 11 might be remembered as the second deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. A Cuban couple named Jose Gomez-Abad and Elsa Montero were among the terrorist ringleaders of that Castroite terror plot.

Now “I hold here in my hands” a list of Communist terrorists who Julia Sweig loudly and proudly thanks for collaborating with her “scholarly” projects. “Elsa Montero and Jose Gomez Abad championed this project,” gushes Julia Sweig in the acknowledgements to her book, Inside the Cuban Revolution which was written with the enthusiastic partnership of the Castro regime. “In Cuba many people spent long hours with me, helped open doors I could not have pushed through myself, and offered friendship and warmth to myself during research trips to the island,” continues the paean by CBS “new analyst” to her dear Cuban friends and professional collaborators, Elsa Montero and (the recently deceased) Jose Gomez Abad.

Oh, I know, I know, such claims leave Frontpage and your humble servant open to charges (from pinkos) of “Mc Carthyism!”

Fine. Let’s try and make the thorough documentation for these charges easy for pinkos to follow. Such a procedure is not easy! But here goes. Here’s our own Venona Papers for these charges:

Exhibit A: Scroll down on this link and note the photocopy of The New York Times from Nov. 19, 1962. Please note the names of the Cuban terrorists who J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI nabbed in the very nick of time, foiling their plot to detonate massive bombs in several of Manhattan’s biggest department stores on the day of the Macy’s parade in 1962.

Exhibit B: Now here’s the acknowledgements in Julia Sweig’s book “Inside the Cuban Revolution,” which was written with the eager partnership of the terror-sponsoring Castro regime. Note the names Jose Gomez Abad and Elsa Montero.

Yes, amigos, these are the very KGB-trained Cuban terrorists who garnered front-page coverage from the New York Times on Nov. 19th, 1962 for plotting to dismember, incinerate and entomb thousands of American holiday shoppers in America’s biggest department stores on America’s busiest shopping day. This horrific terror plot, whose death toll would have probably dwarfed that of 9-11 is further fleshed out (again with thorough documentation) here.

In her book’s acknowledgements current CBS “news analyst” Julia Sweig also thanks Ramon Sanchez Parodi, Jose Antonio Arbesu, Fernando Miguel Garcia, Hugo Ernesto Yedra and Josefina Vidal for their “warmth, their friendship and their kindness in opening Cuban doors.”

Chris Simmons (again, America’s top Cuba spycatcher) identified every one of the above as apparatchiks of Cuba’s intelligence agency. Josefina Vidal was booted from the U.S. in 2003 for espionage, after Simmons himself fingered her.

I haven’t checked Guinness Book of World Records, but effusively thanking the warm support of 7 different intelligence agents of a terror-sponsoring enemy nation in your book’s acknowledgements– three of whom were expelled from the U.S. for terrorism and/or espionage– must be some kind of record, at least for someone outside a maximum-security federal prison.

Leave it to CBS to bill such a person as an “impartial news analyst.”