The Cuban spy master who allegedly ran the plot to ambush two Brothers to the Rescue airplanes is the same intelligence veteran who was chief investigator in the notorious 1989 trial of Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, exiles say.

A federal indictment Friday of 14 accused Cuban spies in Miami used only the code ``MX for the Havana chief who directed the spies to gather information that helped MiG warplanes kill four Brothers pilots in 1996.

But knowledgeable exiles identified him as Eduardo Delgado Rodriguez, a general in his mid-50s who has headed the Interior Ministry's Directorate of Intelligence (DI), Cuba's main foreign espionage agency, for about six years.

Delgado made his mark as lead investigator in the highly publicized trial of Ochoa, an army general accused of drug trafficking along with several top Interior Ministry officers, said Miami author Norberto Fuentes.

Ochoa, an army hero of the Angola war, and three other officers were convicted and executed amid reports that Ochoa's only real fault had been to criticize President Fidel Castro.

Monitored military brass

Delgado was then a lieutenant colonel in charge of the section within the armed forces' counterintelligence agency that watched senior military officers, said Fuentes, author of a book on Ochoa, In the Jaws of the Wolf, to be published this summer.

Armed Forces chief Raul Castro, brother of the president, ordered a major purge of the Interior Ministry just weeks after the trial and appointed military officers to run both domestic and foreign intelligence branches.

Delgado was named Deputy Interior Minister in charge of the counter-intelligence section, known as the Directorate for State Security, with the rank of colonel, said Fuentes, who defected in 1994.

Command of the intelligence branch, the DI, initially went to Gen. Jesus Bermudez Cutiño, then the head of military counterintelligence, Fuentes and other exiles reported.

The DI, headquartered in a former Havana apartment complex known to employees simply as ``El Edificio, or The Building, is Cuba's main foreign intelligence arm and has long been considered as one of the best in the world.

Its main targets in the United States have always been exile groups viewed by Havana as dominating U.S. policy toward Castro and often planning or launching armed attacks against his government.

But Bermudez Cutiño was dismissed as DI chief around 1993 under mysterious circumstances, said Fuentes and two former Cuban intelligence officers who now live in Miami and asked for anonymity.

Fuentes said Bermudez was discovered pilfering money from a fund for foreign diplomatic couriers, and was blamed for several security foul-ups during a Castro visit to Spain in 1992.

One of the intelligence officers said Bermudez was dismissed for operational foul-ups -- including the filming of a Cuban spy meeting with one of his agents in a New York hotel room in 1992 by Miami's Channel 23.

He was immediately replaced by Delgado, described by Fuentes as a tough-looking man, ``blond and always well combed. Fuentes said Delgado was still in charge of DI just a few weeks ago.

In turn, Delgado's job at counterintelligence went to Gen. Carlos Fernandez Gondin, about 56 years old, who now also has the title of deputy minister of the interior, Fuentes said.

Counterintelligence maintains domestic security by monitoring dissidents as well as Cuban government officials for signs of corruption or recruitment by foreign intelligence services.

Delgado, Bermudez and Fernandez are said to be protégés of Interior Minister Abelardo Colome Ibarra, a long-time Raul Castro aide who is Cuba's only three-star general and a member of the ruling Communist Party's inner circle, the politburo.

Colorful names dismissed

Fuentes dismissed the Miami indictment's mention of code names such as ``Operation Scorpion and the ``Wasp Network as ``typical Castro mocking of Cuban exiles and U.S. authorities.

But he said the indictment's mention of the ``MX code for the DI chief was in line with Cuba's long-time use of the letter ``M as the first part of the two-letter codes assigned to all intelligence departments -- just as Great Britain used MI5 and MI6 for its spy and spy-catching agencies.

Cuba changes the codes frequently to confuse foreign intelligence agencies trying to track its structures, Fuentes added. He said ``MX was once the code for the DI's communications department.

``They can change the code all they want, said Fuentes, ``but it's Delgado and his employer Castro who ordered the murder of those four Brothers pilots.
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