Ambassador nominee still haunted by Cuban romance
President Obama’s nomination of Mari Carmen Aponte to be the next U.S. ambassador to El Salvador still faces Republican opposition due to a relationship she had with a Cuban American more than 15 years ago. The objections surfaced again during today’s business meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which approved her nomination despite "no" ...
President Obama's nomination of Mari Carmen Aponte to be the next U.S. ambassador to El Salvador still faces Republican opposition due to a relationship she had with a Cuban American more than 15 years ago.
President Obama’s nomination of Mari Carmen Aponte to be the next U.S. ambassador to El Salvador still faces Republican opposition due to a relationship she had with a Cuban American more than 15 years ago.
The objections surfaced again during today’s business meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which approved her nomination despite "no" votes by several GOP committee members. Led by South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, the Republicans are demanding more information about Aponte’s long-ago romance with Roberto Tamayo, a Cuban-born insurance salesman who was alleged to have ties to both the FBI and Castro’s intelligence apparatus.
DeMint and the other Republicans want access to all of the FBI’s records on the relationship. The FBI interviewed both Aponte and Tamayo about the matter back in 1993, but Aponte has admitted she declined to take a lie-detector test. She withdrew herself from consideration to be ambassador to the Dominican Republic in 1998 after then Sen. Jesse Helms promised to ask invasive questions about the relationship at her hearing, citing "personal reasons."
Now, the GOP is making an issue out of it all over again.
"The allegations were apparently serious enough for her to withdraw her nomination in 1998 so I think it’s fair to ask some questions," DeMint told The Cable.
"With that many Republicans voting no in the committee, one person is probably going to ask for a debate and a vote," DeMint said. That’s the clear code language for a Senate hold, which is often just a senator’s promise not to support a simple confirmation by unanimous consent. "I doubt she’ll be confirmed without a vote."
Sen. John Barrasso, R-WY, and anti-Castro Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ, have both seen at least some of the FBI’s material. Barrasso said he supported DeMint’s request to see the whole file.
But Menendez came to Aponte’s defense at the business meeting and said, "If I thought that after having reviewed the file that Miss Aponte would be a security risk to the United States in any context, but particularly in the context of the Castro regime having access to her, I would oppose her. But that is simply not the case."
He also disputed the existence of a classified memo that was reportedly prepared for Helms with damaging information about the relationship and alleged contacts Amonte had with Cuban intelligence operatives.
"I’ve talked to people who served with Senator Helms and his staff and there is no memo," said Mendendez. "It’s hard to disprove something that doesn’t exist."
Chairman John Kerry, D-MA, noted that she has received top-secret security clearance twice since the alleged affair. Not having an ambassador in El Salvador hurts American interests, he added.
"After an exhaustive investigative process, with the entire U.S. intelligence community looking at this twice since these allegations appeared about her former boyfriend, she has been given top-secret clearance," Kerry said. "Either our intelligence community is completely incompetent in looking at these things, or we have to trust them."
At her March 17 confirmation hearing, Aponte gave her most detailed account to date about the relationship and her interactions with Cuban officials in the 1980s.
"Between 1982 and 1994, I was romantically involved with a Cuban American. It was a romantic relationship. In the course of that relationship, he had some contacts with the Cuban Interests Section that arose out of volunteer work that he did for Cuban Americans, who like himself, wanted to travel to Cuba to see relatives," Aponte said.
"Because we were dating, were a couple, on occasion we would go out with other couples from the Cuban Interests Section who helped him and facilitated the paperwork. They were all social contacts. There came a time when the relationship was not working out. We finally broke up in 1994. In 1993, in the Clinton administration, I was visited by the FBI who wanted to discuss the relationship with me," she said.
The FBI later gave Aponte "a clean bill of health," a National Security Council spokesman told the Washington Times in 1999.
Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.
Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.
A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.
Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @joshrogin
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