The United States sent an inert Hellfire missile to Europe for training purposes in 2014, but somehow the missile was then mistakenly shipped from Europe to Cuba.
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If the missile was purposefully diverted to Havana, the incident could be a violation of the Arms Export Control Act and even sanction laws against Cuba, the Journal said.
From Paris the missile was due to be sent to Florida.
U.S. officials are increasingly skeptical about their chances of building a criminal case in connection with a U.S. Hellfire missile sent to Cuba, because the sensitive technology passed through so many hands in so many places that it may be hard to blame any person or company, according to people familiar with the case. “That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out”, a USA official told the Journal.
The missile wrongly sent to Cuba is called a Hellfire Captive Air Training Missile (CATM), a “dummy missile” used in exercises. The fear at the Pentagon is less that Cuba itself will try to reverse-engineer all those clever laser guidance and targeting technology inside the missile, but that it may have given others access to it who might try to do just that, including Russian Federation and North Korea.
The official said the USA doesn’t want any defense technology to remain in a proscribed country, whether that country can use it or not.
U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Joseph Federico loads a Hellfire missile on to a MH-60S Knight Hawk helicopter on the flight deck of amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge to prepare for Operation Odyssey Dawn missions in the Mediterranean Sea, March 19, 2011. The delay could have been complicated by the attention paid to the historic thaw between the USA and Cuba last December, followed by the restoring of ties and opening of embassies in Washington and Havana this summer. Marco Rubio of Florida wrote to the State Department on Friday to say it “apparently tried to withhold this information” (about the shipment of the missile) from Congress and the public.
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The US Justice Department is investigating the loss of the missile to establish who was responsible.
