A Seat in a Spy Swap Drama

Michael Isikoff recalls his small part in a big U.S.-Cuba Cold War drama told in a new podcast series, "I Spy: The U,S,, Cuba and the Secret Deal that Ended the Cold War."

Michael Isikoff (right) with Gerardo Hernández in Havana after the convicted Cuban agent was swapped for the USAID contractor Alan Gross and an important CIA spy. It was Isikoff’s NBC interview with the tearful wife of the imprisoned Cuban a year earlier that helped get the ball rolling for a spy swap. The story is recounted in a new 8-part podcast, I Spy: The U,S,, Cuba and the Secret Deal that Ended the Cold War, (Yahoo News)

One February evening 10 years ago, I strolled through the streets of Havana with the so-called Cuban 5— a band of Communist spies whose ringleader, Gerardo Hernández, had just been released from a U.S. prison in California. It was a wild and wholly improbable scene. Barely six weeks earlier, Hernández had been serving a double life sentence for conspiracy to commit espionage and murder, with no possibility of parole. HIs fate seemed doomed.

But then, thanks to a stunning agreement between President Barack Obama and Cuban leader Raul Castro to restore diplomatic relations after more than 50 years of Cold War hostilities, Hernández was a free man, the result of super secret negotiations that produced a classic spy swap: Hernández and two of his Cuban 5 colleagues still in U.S. jails were let go in exchange for Cuba’s release of a CIA mole who had penetrated Havana’s intelligence directorate, and an American contractor, Alan Gross, who had been locked up for years by the Cubans on suspicions of espionage.

As they walked through the streets of Romerillo, one of Havana’’s poorest neighborhoods, Hernández and his Cuban 5 comrades were mobbed. It was instantly clear they had become symbols of national pride and, so it seemed then, harbingers of a new dawn in U.S.-Cuba relations. Women embraced and kissed them. Children beseeched them for their autographs, and everyone wanted a picture taken with them. There was, for Hernández, only one word to describe what was happening. It was a “miracle,” he told me that night, laughing, as much at the irony coming from him, a loyal Fidelista, as he looked up at a shrine to San Lazaro, the patron saint of Cuba.    

The inside story of that U.S.-Cuba spy swap—and the fleeting moment it seemed to offer for a rapprochement between two bitter adversaries—is told with fascinating new details in I Spy: The U,S,, Cuba and the Secret Deal that Ended the Cold War, an eight-part podcast on Audible produced and narrated by Dan Ephron, executive editor of Foreign Policy. It’s an engrossing drama filled with twists and turns, crushing setbacks and high level interventions (from the Vatican, of all places) that nonetheless shows the possibilities of creative diplomacy when pursued by a White House committed to breaking loose from what it saw as dead-end policies and stale Cold War shibboleths.