Federal Agents Expected Worst in Miami

Commanders of the raid that reunited Elian Gonzalez with his father said that they went into the house brandishing automatic weapons because intelligence reports indicated a network of heavily armed Cuban American extremists was ringing the property.

Indeed, when agents alighted from a van specially outfitted with sliding doors, bulletproof glass and puncture-proof tires, they were forced to fight their way into the house in Miami’s Little Havana community through a swarm of men who jumped over fences, grabbed at them and knocked one agent to the ground, the agents said.

“They were hurdling fences, clambering over barricades. People were starting to form human chains. . . . They did everything in their power to prevent us from executing that search warrant,” said James D. Goldman, assistant director for investigations for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and commander of the raid that took the 6-year-old boy from the home of Lazaro Gonzalez, his great-uncle, and took him to his father.

Goldman said that some of those guarding the Gonzalez home included people with criminal records, others with permits to carry concealed weapons and others with records of anti-Castro terrorist activity.

The information led the immigration service to plan a large military-style raid with about 140 agents, six armed with automatic weapons.

Goldman said that agents who had been surveying the property for months and gathering intelligence through aerial photographs, analysis of television footage and other means detected what they described as a several-layered security cordon around the house where Elian was living after he was rescued off the coast of Florida on Nov. 25.

Four men with criminal convictions including armed robbery were posted in a tent behind a house that shares a backyard fence with the Gonzalez home, he said.

In the yard of the Gonzalez house was another group of men with concealed-weapon permits, whom Goldman described as “security guards.”

And on surrounding streets was a “crows’ colony” of supporters, Goldman said. From lawn chairs they kept track with walkie-talkies of law enforcement officers in the area and challenged several undercover agents in the days preceding the operation, Goldman said.

In the crowd gathered around the Gonzalez home, meanwhile, five members of a military anti-Castro group known as Alpha 66 were seen on several occasions, Goldman said. Three of the five had taken credit for firing from a boat into an oceanside hotel in Cuba in 1995, Goldman said.

And in a house down the street, other supporters phoned in information on potential government action to a local radio station, Radio Mambi, operated by fiercely anti-Castro Cuban exiles. On several occasions, thousands of demonstrators went to the house after the station broadcast alarms.

Members of Lazaro Gonzalez’s family have complained that federal agents used excessive force in the predawn raid and that, given an opportunity, they would have complied peacefully with agents’ demands to turn over the boy. They have insisted that there were no weapons inside the house.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has been under considerable fire for authorizing the raid, but plans for a Senate inquiry into the Clinton administration’s handling of legal issues in the Elian case--including the raid in which federal agents seized the boy--took an abrupt detour Friday as Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) announced postponement of a hearing that had been scheduled for next Wednesday.

Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Friday that he would announce a new date for a hearing “in the near future.” In a prepared statement, he cited a delay in obtaining relevant documents from the Justice Department as the reason for the postponement.

The announcement came days after Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) asserted that a hearing was planned for next week. But lawmakers such as Lott who have been critical of the administration’s handling of the Gonzalez case have run into public skepticism. Polls show that most Americans believe congressional hearings on the raid are not needed.

Seizing on that sentiment, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in a written statement that Hatch’s announcement “can serve as the first step of a graceful exit strategy for hearings that were a mistake in the first place. . . . Virtually every fact is known about this case, and most Americans see no reason to spend the time or money just to second-guess dedicated law enforcement officers willing to put their lives on the line to get a little boy back to his father.”

As described by Goldman and other agents involved, there was no question that the raid was a tactical success. Goldman said it took 154 seconds from the time agents left their vans to the time they drove away.

Goldman, the first agent to the door of the house, said he knocked on the door for 25 seconds before he directed other agents to break the door with a battering ram.

No one was injured in the raid.