It has been billed as the biggest Cuban espionage trial since the
missile crisis of the early 60s. But did Red Ovispa, Havana's Florida
intelligence network, actually uncover any secrets? Julian Borger on the
impoverished agents who were too tired to spy
Julian Borger. Tuesday March 6, 2001.
The Guardian.
Maggie Becker is still trying to adjust to the strange turn her life has
taken since moving down to Key West. Fifteen years ago, she left Pennsylvania
and came to the Sunshine State in search of a relaxed way of life and a
cosmopolitan community. What she also found was love with a sweet-natured,
idealistic salsa-instructor from Cuba, who wrote romantic poems and got by on a
series of odd jobs.
By 1998, a life was finally beginning to take shape. Maggie was working as a
massage therapist and her boyfriend, Antonio Guerrero, had clinched a permanent
job in charge of waste disposal at Key West's Boca Chica air force base. She had
persuaded him to move in and they were beginning to learn each other's
languages, as well as dancing salsa and taking singing lessons together.
It was far too good to last. The sense of peace and contentment only served
to amplify the shock when FBI agents crashed through her door in the early hours
of September 12 and forced Antonio to the floor. Your boyfriend is a spy, they
told her. She should have known, they added. He was a Cuban, and he had studied
in Kiev.
At the same time, elsewhere in South Florida, nine other Cubans were being
similarly roused from their sleep and arrested for their role in a spy ring
reporting to Havana under the codename Red Avispa - the Wasp Network. Four more
members of the network had managed to slip away, but the federal agents were
able to grab the ringleader, a man going by the name of Manuel Viramontez, a
graphic artist living in North Miami Beach.
On being read his rights, Viramontez's first reaction was to warn the FBI
agents that the pornography they would find in his flat was purely for his work
as an artist. They also found computer disks and documents filled with
codewords, together with correspondence between him and his controllers in
Havana. Viramontez turned out to be a captain in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed
Forces called Gerardo Hernandez, codenamed Giro, who acted as a handler for the
other agents. On being driven to prison, he asked an FBI man: "Which one of
us fucked up?"
It appears that they all had. The amount of information they had left on
floppy disks or given away in intercepted radio messages fills 1,400 pages -
three fat folders of prosecution evidence - and that is just the highlights.
Five members of the network pleaded guilty, and agreed to cooperate with the
prosecution. Even Captain Hernandez ignored Havana's instructions that "under
no circumstances" should he ever admit "to being part of, or linked
to, Cuban intelligence or any other Cuban government organisation".
Hernandez, Maggie's boyfriend Guerrero and three others are being tried for
espionage in a federal court in Miami, in what has been billed as the biggest
Cuban spy trial since the cold war, and arguably since the Cuban missile crisis.
In a small chamber on the seventh floor of the Miami court building, the
five Cubans sit in two rows, wearing dark suits and headphones to hear the trial
in Spanish. Guerrero, a small man with sleepy eyes and a moustache, sits quietly
in a corner to Judge Lenard's right. Hernandez is near the centre of the
chamber; he has the bald head, goatee and sheer intensity of a young Lenin.
During the past two months, the prosecution has laid out the evidence to
support a darkly compelling case. Government lawyers have produced fake identity
papers, secret codes, short-wave radios and voluminous correspondence between
the Wasp Network and its Havana controllers about US air force deployments and
the goings-on within various Cuban exile groups.
Four pilots from one of the latter infiltrated organisations, Brothers to
the Rescue, were killed in 1996 when their small Cessna aircraft were shot down
by Cuban air force jets near Havana. Hernandez, as the chief spy, is facing a
murder conspiracy charge for their deaths. All in all, the prosecution has
insisted, the Cuban spy-ring posed a serious threat to US national security.
However, leafing through the case files, it is possible to draw an entirely
different conclusion: that the Wasp Network had no sting. The emails and
intercepted radio exchanges make clear that as the years went by, the spies
spent a steadily increasing share of their time and effort just trying to get by
on the meagre stipend sent by Havana. Less and less time was spent trying to
find out American secrets. In fact, the network never succeeded in obtaining any
classified material at all.
Part of their problem seems to have been that the Cuban directorate of
intelligence appears to have had a rather outdated view of Florida rents, and
several of the agents had to hold down two jobs at a time just to be able to
afford a tiny studio flat. They also had to deal with difficult relationships,
an obnoxious mother-in-law and at least one bout of haemorrhoids. They were
simply too exhausted to spy. Their ability to fraternise with US air force
pilots and soldiers was also severely constrained by the fact that they had
precious little money for beer and they hardly spoke any English. Much of the
information they sent back was gleaned from the newspapers and, in one instance,
the Miami bus timetable.
The defence case, which opened yesterday, will in essence plead
incompetence. Paul McKenna, Hernandez's lawyer, will argue that the network's
attempts to penetrate the US military were farcical, and that the infiltration
of the wild-eyed Cuban exile movement was a defensive measure aimed at
pre-empting terrorist acts. Brothers to the Rescue had been warned several times
about their provocative flights over Havana by both the Cubans and the US
aviation authorities, the defence argues. They would have been shot down even if
their organisation had not been infiltrated.
For all its farcical elements, the Wasp Network file is, nevertheless, one
of the more fascinating documents to emerge from the history of cloak and
dagger. It is a postmodern journal of low-budget espionage, in which the cloak
is moth-eaten and the dagger rusty. The conspirators meet in a McDonald's or a
Burger King, where the ringleader, Hernandez, has to pick up the bill and
account to the tight-fisted directorate of intelligence for every last french
fry. He also has to file expense claims for purchases, such as a $5.28
air-freshener, and the $6.75 cockroach repellent he bought for his $580 per
month apartment at the less savoury end of North Miami Beach.
Hernandez is a complex figure, who in some aspects reflects all the
contradictions of the Cuban revolution. He is both grandiloquent and
foul-mouthed; disciplined and yet hopelessly accident-prone; contemptuous of
theenemy, but a big softy when it came to the struggling spies in his charge.
Agent Giro's missives are embroidered with flowery socialist rhetoric about
serving the cause, and marking the progress of "our invincible revolution".
Yet he also comes across as endearingly incompetent, such as when he
shamefacedly confesses the loss of a costly pager, used by the Wasp Network to
stay in touch with Cuba.
"What happened was that I got into the apartment building pool one day
and forgot that my beeper was in one of my shorts pockets. And it drowned,"
he tells his superior officer at headquarters.
It is also clear from a disapproving note in 1995 from the "technical
department" - Havana's answer to James Bond's Q - that agent Giro misplaced
a computer loaded with secret codes. All agents consequently had to load new
programs. Later on, Hernandez complains of another computer mishap, which he
thinks might be caused by "some fucking virus".
As time goes by, the file also shows Hernandez, the party ideologue,
becoming a social worker for his troubled and complaining operatives. He
distributes advice, encouragement and avuncular support aimed at keeping up
morale. He sends Havana a concerned note saying one of his agents is "debilitated"
with "dark circles around his eyes" from trying to make a living.
Another is working so hard "he has less and less time for operational work".
One of the women in the Wasp ring, Amarylis Santos, codenamed Julia, fails
to do any spying at all because of a long list of personal problems.
"As for the female comrade, we let her know of HQ's concerns that she
has not begun to 'produce' anything yet, and I gave her my thoughts," agent
Giro reports. "She became a little embarrassed and said . . . 'the thing is
that if it is not one thing, it is another'. First, she had to adapt, then the
job, night school, the pregnancy and now to top it off, she is having problems
with haemorrhoids that are driving her crazy and she might have to have an
operation."
Later on, the troubled agent Julia has to be counselled on the imminent
arrival in Miami of her feared mother-in-law , who "stuck her nose into
everything" the last time they lived together.
The worst dilemma was the question of relationships with Americans. On the
one hand, they were a desirable means of melting into the background; on the
other, they were fraught with operational risks. Hernandez decided he could not
afford to develop one. "Going out one night to a club costs you $50 easily,
without eating," he noted. Another agent, Juan Pablo Roque, fooled his wife
so completely that she is now suing the Cuban government for rape, on the
grounds that sexual intercourse was procured by fraud.
Then there is the story of Antonio and Maggie, the middle-aged Romeo and
Juliet of the Wasp affair, whose romance survived the FBI's unexpected
intervention. "If you saw the reams of letters he sent from prison, there
would be no doubt in anyone's mind," she said in a telephone interview from
Key West.
It has been hard for Becker to read all the Wasp correspondence, in which
their affair was treated like just another spy operation. On the question of
moving in with Maggie and perhaps even having a child together, Guerrero
(codenamed Lorient) wondered aloud whether such moves might not "come
between our projections, and is positive for the objectives planned for me".
Otherwise, he added, "we must direct our actions to cutting off the
relationship". For his part, Giro added: "Concerning Maggie, we made a
marriage proposal to management and it is pending approval." The orders
from Havana were: move in (it would save money); drag out the question of
marriage; and avoid "by all means" having a child.
Becker, aged 50, wants to shrug off the years of deception. "It's like,
happened," she says, "and I'm not going to judge it."
She believes that by attempting to forestall acts of terrorism by Cuban
exile groups, Guerrero was doing nothing wrong. Furthermore, Becker insists that
the Antonio she knew ("a complete idealist . . . very oriented towards
Buddhism") was the real Antonio, and that his jargon-filled reports back to
Havana were simply intended to keep his bosses happy so that they could continue
to lead a hard-up but happy life in the Keys.
Certainly, agent Lorient's reports from inside Boca Chica base did not tell
Havana a lot they did not already know. He counted the planes coming in and out,
but as Becker points out, "it would have been much easier to do that from
outside the base, and without having to work nine hours a day".
Guerrero also reported on the construction of what he claimed was a "secret
facility" in the base, but there is no evidence to back its existence up.
The base is constantly open to visitors and he could easily have made it up in
order to make his efforts at spying appear more worthwhile than they really
were.
In which case, he would be the perfect mirror image of Graham Greene's
anti-hero in Our Man in Havana - Guerrero and the fictional character both share
the same incompetence and imagination. Indeed, the Wasp Network trial could be
billed as Their Men from Havana. No literary invention could more poignantly
evoke the pathos and sheer humanity of Cuba's lonely struggle than this
tragicomic coda to the cold war.
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