By the end of the first twelve months of operations, the secret agents of the Wasp Network had crammed the director general of intelligence’s archives in Havana with more than 3,000 pages of reports. As time went by, the job of the agents entrusted with these clandestine infiltrations came to follow a routine that rarely changed. Communication between each individual and their immediate boss was by means of messages transmitted by pagers in alphanumeric codes devised and used for decades by the old Soviet Union. The first generation of cell phones was already available on the market, but their use had been discarded because of the price, beyond the group’s modest budget, and because of the ease with which these devices could be tracked and bugged, a risk from which pagers were free. Every ten or fifteen days an agent would receive a coded message from his supervisor indicating a “spot”—the place where the material gathered during the period should be delivered. If the meeting involved just the passing on of a report, the method of choice, in the intelligence services’ jargon, was the “brush pass”—handing over something covertly when bumping slightly into someone. In these cases agents would meet in one of the dozens of Walgreens pharmacies or Publix supermarkets spread over the Miami metropolitan area, where material could change hands in the aisles without a word being said. In cases where, other than the handover of material, there was a need for discussion between the parties, the choice would always be some busy and noisy fast-food restaurant like McDonald’s, Burger King, Dunkin’ Donuts or Taco Bell. The frequent presence of anti-Castroist leaders and the high prices on their menus excluded from the list of “spots” some Little Havana restarants, like La Carreta and the Versalles. The material gathered in the period before each meeting was delivered to the supervisor on 5.25-inch diskettes with a capacity of only 800 kilobytes, real dinosaurs compared to the tiny pen drives that the world would come to know two decades later, capable of storing 30,000 times more data than their ancestors.
The mass of raw information gathered by the agents was organized by supervisors Ramón Labañino, Ricardo Villareal and Remijio Luna—who themselves had no connection to, or knowledge of, one another—and then passed on to Gerardo Hernández. It was he who gave the final form to the material, which, after being encrypted again, was sent to the Main Center. To communicate with Cuba, the chief of operations could choose between three options, depending on the circumstances. The simplest and safest was the small shortwave transmitter he kept in his apartment. At set times and on wavelengths previously agreed with Havana, he would put a recording on the air that sounded like the beeps made when pressing the buttons of a digital phone. Indecipherable to whoever might pick up the transmission, each beep stood for a letter or a set of letters that could only be decoded by DSS specialists. For security reasons the code would modify itself continually and automatically, so that the meaning of a certain tone would change from message to message. The second option was to use the pitirre, named after a little Cuban bird, a system of telephonic transmission of coded data to pagers in the Cuban mission at the UN in New York, and in some Cuban embassies in Central America. If for some reason it was impossible to use either radio or pitirre, Hernández encoded the data to be sent and printed it on sheets of bond paper, sealed everything in an envelope and put it in a street mailbox, addressed to a certain post office box in some Central American country. When the envelope reached its destination, someone from the Cuban embassy or consulate would collect it and send it on to Havana by diplomatic bag—very likely unaware of the item’s origin and contents.
It didn’t take long for results to appear. And it soon became clear that the risks run by the group of Cuban agents in the United States were justified. One morning in March 1995, when the Wasp Network had already completed a year and a half of full operations, two foreigners were discreetly pulled from a noisy line of Costa Rican tourists who had just landed at the José Martí Airport in Havana. After a few hours of interrogation at the airport, the pair confessed that they were traveling under false names and with false passports, that they were not Costa Rican and that they were not in Cuba to admire the sights. Their names were Santos Armando Martínez Rueda and José Ramírez Oro, Cuban Americans resident in the United States. It was the second time in a month they had trodden Cuban soil. The first time they had entered the country clandestinely by sea, to bury, in the town of Puerto Padre in Las Tunas province, a load of explosives, part of which would be used in an attack on the Hotel Meliá, a Spanish chain, in Varadero. On the present occasion they had intended to propose further targets for their local accomplices. Both confessed to taking orders from the Cuban American National Foundation. Martínez Rueda and Ramírez Oro, however, would not be the only terrorists caught by the Cuban police using information from agents based in the United States. In this first period of the network’s activities, the reports sent from Florida to Havana enabled the Cuban police to thwart at least twenty attacks on its soil and to seize explosives, weapons and cash. The diligence of the intelligence services and the Cuban police led to the imprisonment of thirty terrorists, including Americans of Cuban origin, trained in camps in Miami, and foreign mercenaries paid by anti-Castroist organizations.
The most daring action planned by these groups was meant to have taken place in November 1994, and consisted of nothing less than the assassination of President Fidel Castro. From aboard a yacht, assisted by five mercenaries, Luis Posada Carriles himself managed to bring a small arsenal into the historic colonial town of Cartagena de Indias in Colombia, where the Fourth Ibero-American Summit was about to take place. Alerted by the Wasp Network, the Cuban authorities doubled their security measures around Fidel, and managed to thwart the crime. “I was standing behind the journalists and got as far as being really close to Castro’s friend, Gabriel García Márquez,” Posada Carriles confessed to the New York Times, “but I only managed to see Castro from a distance.”
Also based on information produced by the Wasp Network, on at least three occasions the Foreign Ministry in Cuba succeeded in getting the United States Coast Guard to intercept boats from Florida, loaded with arms and explosives, that were headed for the Cuban coastline to carry out attacks on tourist spots. This resulted in the American police detaining nineteen mercenaries who were directly involved in the operations. Ten were freed on the spot by the FBI, and the nine remaining, though formally charged with acts of terrorism, had their cases shelved by Federal Judge Lawrence King, and were set free.
However, it was not always possible to prevent attacks. The pressures exerted by Cuba and its success in thwarting so many armed actions did not discourage the anti-Castroist groups. Under the conniving eye of the American authorities, the anti-Castroists persisted by dint of violence, bombs and bullets in trying to cut off the flow of tourists who were saving the Island from bankruptcy and impeding their dream of bringing the Revolution to its knees. Since the Network had installed itself in the United States, Cuba had been the victim of dozens of hotel attacks by invasion of its territory, and more than thirty violations of its airspace by planes coming from the United States—the large majority being Brothers or Democracy Movement planes, frequently flown by René or Juan Pablo Roque. The Guitart Hotel alone, a comfortable four-star hotel on Cayo Coco beach, was attacked three times during the year 1994 by motorboats from Key West—at one point, armed with machine guns spraying .50 caliber bullets at the beach, injuring some and terrifying the hundreds of foreign tourists who were there in high season.
In September 1993, the Mexican tourist Marcelo García Rubalcava, resident in the United States for more than thirty years, had been arrested as he disembarked in Havana. Inside the false tubes of toothpaste and bottles of shampoo that the traveler carried in his luggage, the police found enough C-4 plastic explosive to blow up a truck sky high. One link connected Rubalcava to the coming attacks on the Guitart Hotel: in both cases the financial backer was the octogenarian Andrés Nazario Sargén, a man just over five feet tall, and the founder and main leader of one of the oldest and most violent anti-Castroist groups in Florida—Alpha 66.
According to what Sargén himself would confess to the press, Alpha 66 had been responsible not only for the attacks on the Cayo Coco resort and for various attempts to smuggle in explosives, but also for the kidnapping of a passenger plane during a domestic flight in Cuba. After the plane had been diverted to the Fort Myers Airport, in southwestern Florida, the passengers were moved onto another plane back to Cuba. The original craft would never be returned by the United States government. Besides this one, another fifteen acts of air piracy took place during this period.
The radicalization of the exiles’ relations with Cuba was whipped up by a dozen radio stations, legally installed in the Miami metropolitan area, whose programs were a permanent incitement to violence. A brief statistic gleaned by the Wasp Network between January 26 and February 25, 1993, from just seven of the stations—La Voz de la Fundación, La Voz de Alpha 66, La Voz de la Federación Mundial de Ex-Presos, Radio Rumbo a la Libertad, La Voz del Palenque, La Voz de la Resistencia and Radio Unión Liberal Cubana—conveys something of the atmosphere breathed in Florida. Those thirty days had seen the transmission of twenty messages urging the physical elimination of Fidel Castro, one hundred calls to carry out acts of sabotage against the Cuban tourism industry, and almost 500 exhortations to strike actively against the Revolution. Operating in shortwave, which allowed the signal to reach the ears of a good portion of the Cuban population, and protected by the Constitution of the United States with its guarantees for freedom of speech, some of these stations quite casually preached crime. It was common, when harvest time came along in Cuba, to hear the journalist Enrique Encinosa, announcer on Voz de la Resistencia, urge the population to boycott the sugar industry:
The sugar cane harvest is about to begin. This year’s crop must be destroyed. In the past, Castro promised ten million tons. Now, ten million acts of sabotage are necessary. People of Cuba: we call on each one of you to destroy the grinding machines in the sugar factories. Drop pieces of lead pipes or screws in the sugar cane that is being processed. Loosen or damage machine parts. Set fire to the plantations, pouring a little gasoline or other flammable fuel on a cloth bag; set fire to the bag and let it burn for a few minutes then put it out. At night throw the bag into the plantation. Next morning the heat of the sun will take care of lighting the fire again.
The resourcefulness of the organized anti-Castroist groups, their preaching of violence, their formidable and aggressive propaganda against the Revolution broadcast by radio and TV stations and by the Florida press, all gave the agents of the Wasp Network a clear idea of the inequality of the war they were engaged in. Such circumstances spurred them to redouble their efforts in the pursuit of information that would allow the Cuban government to stay a step ahead of the aggressors, frustrate the attacks, arrest the perpetrators and, if possible, identify the masterminds.
Nevertheless, the correspondence between the Cuban agents and Havana, which the FBI began intercepting in 1995, reveals that no matter how immersed in feverish and stressful activities, the Cubans were not immune to ordinary personal issues like passion, homesickness and loneliness. A case in point was Tony. At the height of the network’s activities, he let Gerardo Hernández know that he wanted to marry Maggie, or at least move in with her on a permanent basis, now that he was staying at her house so often. Apart from the emotional reasons, she had found a steady job as a masseuse at the Hilton Hotel in Key West, which increased the couple’s financial stability. The exchange of correspondence between Tony, Hernández and the Main Center is revealing on the nature of the intelligence services’ relationship to their agents. In the first message on this topic to his superiors in Havana, sent as usual by way of Hernández, the agent made it clear that his involvement with the American woman would not take priority over his work, or imperil the activity he was part of in the United States:
She brings up the subject once in a while and I try to get out of it, as best as possible.… We must begin with what is required by the work; that is to say, if we are considering that intensifying this relationship with Maggie, moving into her house first, and even have a child with her at a later time, does not come between our projections, and is positive for the objectives planned for me, then we must move ahead and take some action in this regard. If on the other hand, we consider that living with Maggie and having a child with her is contrary to our work projections, then we must direct our actions at cutting off this relationship.
At the same time he was sending on the request to Cuba, Hernández gave Tony his personal opinion. It wasn’t the first time he had made honest comments on his life and behavior. Giro had previously shown concern over Tony’s excessive weight loss, the result of the vegetarian diet he had adopted under Maggie’s influence. As for the couple living together, the first and obvious concern of the network chief was with security and secrecy, which would have to be amplified if indeed this were to happen. After all, Maggie “didn’t know nor should she even imagine” anything about his intelligence work. Although he was seven years younger than Tony, Hernández spoke to him like an older brother:
“You’ve already been married, so you know that having a wife is not the same as having a girlfriend. Consciously or not, a sense of ownership develops and it’s normal for one to ask the other for explanations about the things they have in common. And, as you must have noticed in your earlier relationships, a woman picks up signs about things that you didn’t even mention or discuss with her.”
Before deciding on their answer, the men from the DSS wanted to know under what legal conditions the two would get married and what would be the consequences for him should they divorce. As they were deliberating over the issue, they suggested to Tony that he delay the wedding “as long as possible.” Only after some months did Gerardo Hernández receive and forward the green light to Tony from Havana, which came with a list of recommendations on the care that the agent should take with this move:
To avoid by all means having a child with Maggie because of the sentimental and legal inconveniences that this might have at some future time … using the problem of Maggie’s age (forty-five years) as a reason, which can put at risk the child’s life or health and Maggie’s life as well.
Periodically review the hard drive of the machine and in case he detects reports sent to us, or any operational information, erase it with Wipe-Info; the latter is a program that the agent has and was sent to him by the comrades from M-XV [code that identified the Cuban embassy at the UN].
Maintain the working disks with other disks that contain commercial programs and information. He must keep them in such a way that only he will be able to identify them.
Separate his disks from Maggie’s.
Use the computer for the purposes that he had planned (making of videos) or for other purposes that justify the purchase of the equipment.
Select a place in the house where he will have privacy for working with the equipment. Preferably choose a place that doesn’t look out on the street.
Maintain privacy from Maggie at the time when working on the computer apart from the fact that he may be using it for the purpose of cover. Avoid attracting her attention, that something improper is being done and show her concrete results of how he’s using the equipment.
One week after receiving Havana’s nihil obstat, Tony gathered up his scanty belongings from his motel room and moved them to Maggie’s small, cozy house on Poinciana Road. Like the majority of houses in Key West, Maggie’s was made of white clapboard, with a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms had been turned into a massage room, where, from Wednesday to Saturday, Maggie received clients attracted by an advertisment she had placed in the Yellow Pages. On Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays, her job at the Hilton Hotel kept her busy. In his new house, which was much closer to work, Tony got an extra hour of free time every day, which he filled with morning yoga exercises. His work hours were from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon, with an hour for lunch in the mess room at the aeronaval base. At the end of the day he would drive to the local headquarters of the Democracy Movement where he would stay late at meetings. He would come home, make a frugal meal—the contents of which never included meat, fish, fowl or any food derived from living creatures, like honey, eggs, milk or cheese—and only then would he sit down at the computer, to record onto diskettes the information he would transmit to Gerardo Hernández or to one of the three assistants who supervised him. Since his job on the base at Boca Chica did not allow him access to any restricted or secret sector, Tony received a new and tedious daily task from the DSS directors: to count and identify the planes that landed and took off on the three runways at the military unit. Such caution was warranted, since any attack that might be mounted by American forces against Cuba would obviously come from Key West, the closest point to the Island. It still seemed odd, however, that the Cuban intelligence services should assign to a secret agent a mission that could be done by any ordinary mortal: as the fence that protects the Boca Chica base is scarcely twenty meters from the busy highway that runs from Key West to Miami, the coming and going of planes and helicopters could be monitored and even photographed by any of the thousands of tourists who circulated daily around the place.
If Tony Guerrero’s love life was taken care of, the indefatigable René González still had a long road ahead of him to achieve the dream he nurtured from the moment he landed in the United States: to get the family he had abandoned in Havana five years earlier out of Cuba and into Miami. Still unaware that René’s theft of the plane and his defection had been a front set up by the DSS and that the father of her daughter had not turned into a gusano, by the middle of 1995 Olguita seemed to have finally capitulated in the face of René’s convincing appeals. Although he did not intend to move to another house or change his standard of living, the husband knew that the pay he received from Havana, even augmented by odd jobs and sporadic temporary work, was not enough to sustain a family of three. With the help of his influential friends he eventually managed to get a position as a co-pilot at Arrow Air, an air cargo company based at Miami International Airport. Also, thanks to the good relations he had established with elite anti-Castroist activists in Florida, a few weeks after receiving his wife’s “yes,” René found out that the American Immigration Service had approved Olguita and their daughter as residents of the United States.
Swallowed up by Cuban bureaucracy, however, the government’s authorization for the two of them to leave the country would only be given in December 1995, six months after their initial decision. Before beginning to chase up the paperwork for departure, Olga would be called for an interview in a Ministry of the Interior safe house, where she was greeted by a young, smiling intelligence officer. It was Gerardo Hernández, the Manuel Viramóntez from Miami, who happened to be in Havana on one of his visits. Without beating about the bush, Giro went straight to the point and told her the truth about her husband, an account she listened to in complete astonishment: René was not a traitor to the Revolution. The theft of the plane in San Nicolás de Bari, the escape to Key West and the interviews given to the American press had all been acts in a pantomime set up by Cuban intelligence to hide his real mission: to infiltrate organizations of the extreme right in Florida and to try to prevent terrorist acts against his country.
Although in a state of shock at the news, Olga was overcome by a profound feeling of relief. The revelation put an end to five years of nightmares, sleepless nights and crying all alone. A whirlpool of memories took hold of her: her perplexity at the discovery of his desertion, the humiliation of being seen as the wife of a traitor to the homeland, the five years of loneliness, during which she lived in the unheard-of situation of being at the same time a widow, a married woman, and single—while in actual fact not being any of those three. Gerardo awakened her from these recollections to end the interview, not without having first reiterated a recommendation of the utmost importance for the safety of the operation and of all those involved: no one else should know of what she had just heard. Not even René’s brother or his mother, and much less Irmita, who would go to live with her parents in Miami.
In the midst of the stupor that followed Hernández’s story, Olga was excited at the thought of the trip, but the family’s reunion would still depend on overcoming a calvary that both husband and wife knew well: the lethargic, sleepy local government departments. Even after the departure authorization was conceded, Olga had to suffer for weeks, filling in forms and facing endless lines at crowded counters. Part of this time would be taken up getting an apparently banal document: a declaration by the Ministry of Light Industry, to which Tenerías Habana, where she worked as an engineer, was attached, releasing her from her contract and confirming that the employee “owed nothing” to the State company. On the night of December 20, 1995—a Wednesday—Olga arrived home exhausted from her toings and froings for the paperwork on top of a long day’s work. Tiredness gave way to eagerness when she spotted on the table an envelope from the Cuban Immigration Service—a guarantee that the pair would spend the end of year holidays with René in Miami. The joy lasted only as long as it took to open the letter, when Olga found that it only contained one “white card,” as the exit document was known, and in Irmita’s name. Several more days of agony passed before she discovered that the card bearing her name had been sent to an old address where she had lived with her parents, in the Cerro neighborhood.
Christmas passed, the New Year came and went, but the document reached Olga’s hands only at the beginning of 1996. Thus it was on January 7 that mother and daughter finally boarded one of the charter flights still permitted by the American government, used mainly by Cuban residents in the United States to visit relatives in Cuba. For Irmita, the first impact of her new life hit while she was still on the plane. When the stewardess offered her a tray of candies, the girl took a handful and asked her mother to save them for later. The woman who was traveling next to them, a Cuban American on her way back to Miami, said with a chuckle:
“You don’t have to do that, dear. You’re not in Cuba now, you won’t have to save food anymore.”
“I was taught by my parents always to be polite to everyone,” Irmita would remember, more than ten years later, “but I was so angry at that woman that I pretended I didn’t hear her—I didn’t answer and didn’t even give her a smile.”
Fifty minutes after takeoff, the Boeing 737 was landing at Miami Airport. They were only able to leave customs after being detained for more than an hour by the Immigration Service, where they were photographed, told to fill in forms and fingerprinted for their ID cards. Holding a doll for his daughter and a bouquet of flowers for his wife, the René who awaited them in a suit and tie was a good deal fatter, with his face covered in a thick gray beard—very different from the image they had kept of him five years earlier, skinny, clean-shaven and almost always dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Among the people who were with her father at the airport, Irmita barely recognized her great-grandmother Teté, René’s grandmother, and Teté’s sister Gladys, both of whom had left Cuba when she was still a little girl. In the midst of the turmoil of their arrival, it wasn’t the physical appearance of her father, however, that caused the girl greatest astonishment. Irmita’s eyes opened wide when she noticed in the large welcome committee the smiling figure of a man she had often seen on the news, on television and in photographs published by the press in her country, always identified as a “terrorist assassin” and “a gusano responsible for the death of innocent Cubans”—it was Ramón Saúl Sánchez, the leader of the active anti-Castroist group the Democracy Movement.
After their first few weeks, and with the family installed in René’s tiny apartment, Irmita was enrolled in summer school to learn English. Since René’s salary at Arrow Air was insufficient to maintain the family, Olguita also had to look for a job. The first one she got was as a carer in a private retirement home, whose clientele was mainly Cubans. As an engineer used to the office environment of Tenerías Habana, Olga didn’t adapt well to this new challenge. Apart from the exhausting work, she soon discovered that her duties included the intimate hygiene of very old people on the brink of senility. She resigned even before the first month was up. Her second attempt didn’t last long, either. With the help of her husband’s friends, she was taken on as a telemarketing operator at a large Miami funeral home. The job consisted of making calls to a list of names previously prepared by the owners—almost all of them elderly people or family members of the terminally ill—offering the services and products sold by the company. The nearly deceased or his relatives had at their disposal anything from simple wakes to ceremonies with cocktails and live chamber music, Catholic, Protestant or Evangelical religious services, caskets of various sizes and prices, cremations, graves and tombs for all tastes and budgets. Makeup gave the appearance of the living to the vainest of the dead, who could be buried wearing European designer clothing—real or false, depending on financial resources. The decision to abandon this job, too, wasn’t so much down to the fact that nine out of ten times, Olga’s offers were met with obscene language. The problem was that it was a job paid on commission, with an insignificant, almost symbolic, fixed salary—and the majority of people were decidedly uninterested in their future after death.
The only positive side to the brief and unpleasant experience with the undertakers was the familiarity she acquired with the telephone sales system, which made getting her next job easier. She found work in a language school called Inglés Ahora (English Now) owned by a Cuban, where she would remain for the duration of her time in Miami. This time she would be selling English courses by telephone to the Hispanic community. The company’s target market, notably recently arrived immigrants, was concentrated along an extensive fringe that runs from Florida to California, passing through Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Because of the five-hour time difference along this band, her working day started at one o’clock in the afternoon and ended at eleven o’clock at night. Added to her salary of $5 per hour, was the commission on whatever was sold. The products offered by Inglés Ahora went from simple dictionaries to entire lesson packages on cassette tapes or videos. Even when she hadn’t sold a single dictionary, and that was a rare ocurrence, at the end of the month Olga received around a thousand dollars net. Added to René’s salary at Arrow Air and the odd jobs he did as a pilot for the Democracy Movement, the family was assured of an existence that was modest but without worries—something to which the low cost of living in Miami undoubtedly contributed. The couple’s first luxury was to buy a secondhand car. Encouraged by the slight cushion in their domestic budget and, of course, confident that he would come out unscathed from the dangerous mission he found himself in, René suggested to his wife that they might start thinking about making an old dream come true: having a second child.
As mother and daughter would confess many years later, the happiness in the house was darkened only by a ghost about which no one in the family ever said a word: the real activity of the husband and father. In his relationship with the girl, René had to walk on a knife edge. For example, it was inevitable that he would take Irmita along to family gatherings, which usually brought together militants and the leaders of anti-Castroist organizations. And he could see the bewilderment of his teenage daughter, brought up and educated in a communist society, on seeing her father participate in “prayer chains” at the end of which everyone, holding hands, would shout in unison: “Death to Fidel!”
“I wasn’t dumb and started to put two and two together,” Irmita would remember fifteen years later, now married and planning to give her parents their first grandchild. There were two episodes in particular that made her think. One day René saw a photograph of President Fidel Castro, cut out from some magazine, on the nightstand in her makeshift bedroom. Tactfully, he suggested to the girl that it would be wiser to keep the photograph inside a book. Irmita already had the insight to realize that a true gusano would rip the photo to pieces. Or at least would repeat to the daughter that Fidel was “a communist tyrant who had enslaved Cuba,” as her father’s friends usually referred to the bearded leader. On the other occasion, during a weekend get-together, the wife of one of the big chiefs of the counterrevolution, captivated by the girl’s beauty, announced to all present that she was going to arrange her courtship with no less than the grandson of Jorge Mas Canosa, the head of the CANF. Asked whether he would permit such matchmaking, René kept up the disguise and responded with a smile: “Who wouldn’t be proud to see his daughter married to the grandson of the billionaire who’ll be the first president of a free Cuba?” In the car, on the way home, Irmita decided to test her father’s sincerity and feigned interest in the suggestion to meet, and who knows, to date the grandson of the number one enemy of the Cuban Revolution. René stopped the car and spoke seriously to his daughter.
“Irmita, please,” he said, almost whispering, as if he were afraid of being overheard. “You’re not seriously thinking of going out with that boy, are you?”
She defused the tension with a laugh. “No, Dad, I don’t even want to meet him,” she answered. “And I’m very glad to see that you really don’t want me to meet him either,” she concluded, visibly comforted by what she’d heard. “Without his saying a word to me,” Irmita would remember much later, “at that moment a complicity between us was established.”
Spared from the play-acting that the disguise imposed upon her husband, Olga was a less frequent presence at these meetings. René’s friendship with Juan Pablo Roque helped her get closer to Ana Margarita, mother to a couple of children from her first marriage, both of them around Irmita’s age, but even so, the two never came to be friends. Olga strove to conceal the slight dislike she felt for Roque’s wife, a feeling that seemed to be mutual. “There was never good chemistry in our relationship,” Ana Margarita would confess years later. “Our time together never produced a friendship.” In any case, even if the chemistry were good, there wouldn’t have been enough time for a friendship to blossom between the two women: when Olga and Irmita set foot in Miami, a silent operation was already in place to send the MiG pilot back to Havana. Dissatisfied with his performance, and above all, with what was considered Roque’s “exhibitionist behavior” in Florida, at the end of 1995 the DSS management had initiated an operation to take him out of the United States safely, which had been given the suggestive name of Operación Vedette (Operation Starlet).