Miami Anti-Communist Insider Convicted as Foreign Agent

A retired CIA station chief was sentenced to one year and a day in federal prison last Thursday for selling classified information he combed from top secret U.S. government databases to Angola’s ruling elite.

Four decades after being sent by the CIA to undermine Soviet and Cuban involvement in Angola’s civil war, Miami resident Dale Bendler was caught failing to register as a foreign agent while peddling his security access to a prominent Angolan politician. His conviction has made headlines, but most reporting about Bendler’s 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.

He’s far from the first U.S. official with Cuban-American exile affiliations to be convicted for failing to register as a foreign agent or accused of maintaining shady ties with foreign governments. Former senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) was found guilty in July 2024 for accepting bribes on behalf of the Qatari and Egyptian governments. Less than six months later, another Cuban-American hardliner, former Rep. David Rivera (R-FL) – a former housemate, friend and political ally of Secretary of State Marco Rubio – was indicted for lobbying on behalf of sanctioned Venezuelan businessman Raul Gorrín without registering his activities with the DOJ.

Years before, late Cuban-American Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL), who called the codification of the U.S. embargo into law one of his proudest achievements, was accused of receiving a suitcase full of cash from an indicted Puerto Rican lawmaker. Former Cuban-American House Foreign Affairs Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) — for whom Rubio interned in the early-1990s — lobbied for U.S. weapons sales on behalf of the United Arab Emirates, despite criticizing its government when she first entered Congress.

While Bendler is the most recent high-ranking former U.S. government employee to be convicted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), his role in the U.S. intelligence community's well-documented efforts to undermine the Cuban government has largely evaded scrutiny.

A Lucrative Foreign Influence Operation

Bendler, who along with the FARA violations pleaded guilty in April to mishandling highly-classified materials, earned nearly $360,000 from private clients while working as a full-time CIA contractor. He searched government databases “like it was his own personal Google," according to Adam Berry, acting deputy chief of the Department of Justice's National Security Division.

Prosecutors allege that Bendler put "cash before country" in receiving $20,000 a month between July 2017 and September 2020 to "mount a public relations campaign to rebut the embezzlement allegations" against Swiss-Angolan businessman Jean Claude Bastos de Morais, the former asset manager of Angola's sovereign wealth fund FSDEA.

 Bastos was accused in the 2017 Paradise Papers of investing millions of dollars from the fund in four companies in which he had a personal stake.

According to the filings, Bendler also worked as a subcontractor for lobbying firm BGR Group on behalf of the Hezbollah-linked Lebanese businessman Ibrahim Issaousi, who runs the Democratic Republic of the Congo-based Socimex Group. Issaousi allegedly paid Bendler $10,000 to intervene on his behalf regarding terrorism financing allegations and to help him obtain a U.S. visa. Another one of Bendler’s clients was Venezuelan business mogul Armando Capriles, who in 2019 sought the former CIA agent’s help to avoid being hit with sanctions by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control under the first Trump administration. 

From Angola to El Salvador

Bendler’s influence peddling is just the latest chapter in a shadowy history with Angola that stretches back decades.

On LinkedIn, Bendler said last year that the CIA had sent him to Angola 40 years ago to "complicate Soviet/Cuban efforts" after Fidel Castro dispatched tens of thousands of troops to help the Angolan government resist South Africa’s military offensive.

Before then, Bendler ran covert paramilitary operations in El Salvador to counter Cuba’s support for the FMLN insurgency, which was fighting against a military-run government guilty of widespread atrocities. Bendler was in El Salvador at the same time as infamous anti-Castro terrorist Luis Posada Carilles, who participated in “the covert Iran-Contra affair… as a quartermaster for the rebels” in neighboring Nicaragua. 

Among Bendler’s close affiliates in the intelligence community are the decorated Cuban-American CIA operatives Ric Prado and Félix Rodríguez, the man who gave the order to kill Che Guevara.

Even after retiring from a 30-plus-year career at the CIA, including stints as station chief in Paris and other European capitals, Bendler’s efforts to undermine the Cuban government continued — this time, out in the open.

Miami’s Right-Wing Disinformation Machine

Until recently, Bendler appeared regularly as a commentator on the popular Miami-based Spanish-language media outlet América TeVé. In one appearance last year, Bendler reunited on screen with Cuba's former top diplomat in Iran, Hector Aguililla, who he helped defect to the U.S. in 1988.

After Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, Bendler told the outlet that officials at Cuba’s embassy in Beirut had met with a Hamas delegation earlier that year — proof, he claimed, of Cuba’s alleged role in sponsoring terrorism. Bendler didn’t present evidence of what was discussed or came of the meeting, but that didn’t stop Rubio and other Cuban-American lawmakers from citing Cuba’s alleged Hamas ties as a reason to keep the island designated as a state sponsor of terrorism. There is consensus in the U.S. intelligence community that Cuba doesn’t sponsor terrorism.

Before the 2024 U.S. presidential elections, Bendler and America TeVé’s then-COO Miguel Cossió published an "open letter” to Trump on Cuba in the Washington Times, asking the president to impose more sanctions on the island and its allies.

In another op-ed, the two alleged that Cuba was interfering in the U.S. elections, citing a 2024 U.S. intelligence finding that Havana “worked to build relationships with members of the U.S. media who held negative views of [its] critics in Congress.” No evidence was provided that Cuba actually meddled in U.S. elections.

“Spreading fake news is not a violation of the secrecy oath retired intelligence officers are required to take, but it is unethical,” former National Intelligence Officer for Latin America Fulton Armstrong said. “Bendler may have assumed that, since the U.S. spends millions of dollars a year to generate narratives — including fake news — that it hopes denigrates the Cuban government, he is free to do so as well.”

America TeVé, which has been plagued by scandals and bankruptcy, is a veritable disinformation mill, grinding out distorted, recycled, and often flat-out false narratives about Cuba. Bendler was merely one cog in that mill, working alongside a familiar roster of fellow right-wing propagandists.

Cossío’s close associate is prominent Cuban-American GOP businessman and lawyer Marcell Felipe, considered “one of the key figures behind the nomination” of Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Felipe, who also presides over Miami's American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, has long supported hard-line Cuban-American politicians, hosting the Florida launch event for Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid and paying for a pro-Rubio TV ad alleging then-candidate Trump would be soft on Cuba if elected president. 

Last year, Cossío and Felipe were involved in producing a puff-piece documentary for America TeVé on Bob Menendez to bolster his public image as his corruption trial loomed.

Even after Menendez’s conviction and before his sentencing, he was spotted in a rare public appearance at Felipe’s museum — where Cossió is now a top executive — for a high-profile event that Bendler also attended.

But since Bendler’s conviction, Miami’s hardliners have not been so forgiving of him as they were of Menendez.

A conference Bendler was organizing at Felipe’s museum on "China Economic Warfare in Latin America" — featuring Cuban-American Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-FL), first-term Trump White House official Carlos Díaz-Rosillo, and State Department "Trafficking in Persons Report Hero" Maria Werlau — got canceled, seemingly so that participants could avoid any further affiliation with the former CIA agent.

"Bendler’s colleagues, both active and retired...in the Intelligence Community, as well as his friends, including the author of this article...view his actions as a betrayal of both their country and their personal trust and friendship," wrote Cossío.

Lee Schlenker is a research intern with the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a MA candidate in Latin American Studies at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.