Dummy U.S. Missile Accidentally Shipped To Cuba

In mid-2014, this happened to the Department of Defense, when a crate sent off to Spain ended up, in a roundabout way, shipped to Havana, and the missing crate contained not extra sneakers but a Hellfire missile.

The missile was instead found to have been sent on a circuitous route, involving several shipping companies, through Germany to France. They were first designed as antitank weapons decades ago, but have been modernized to become an important part of the USA government’s antiterrorism arsenal, often fired from Predator drones to carry out lethal attacks on targets in countries including Yemen and Pakistan, said people familiar with the technology.

After news emerged that a commonly used American missile wound up in Cuba after a training exercise in Europe, U.S. officials said the Hellfire missile is inert, lacking key components.

A USA official “with knowledge of the situation”, who was not authorised to speak publicly on the matter and demanded anonymity, confirmed the report’s veracity to The Associated Press.

“Did someone take a bribe to send it somewhere else?”

When Amazon ships your package, you can see basically every turn the deliverer makes – but that’s apparently no so with the US military, which saw one of its secret Hellfire missiles shipped to Cuba previous year, and can’t get it back. Was it an intelligence operation, or just a series of mistakes?

Another anonymous USA official told the Journal that the mishap raises questions about the security of global commercial shipping and the difficulty of keeping close tabs on important items.

Havana and Washington began reestablishing diplomatic ties last July, but Cuba remains on a list of 25 sanctioned countries to which the US does not ship military equipment.

If it turns out that the Hellfire was lost because of human error, the criminal probe would end and the State Department would have to determine whether to pursue a settlement with Lockheed Martin over the incident.