Secret files used against five on trial

 BY ALFONSO CHARDY AND GAIL EPSTEIN NIEVES

 They were perennially short of money and always nervous about being detected.
 But the small band of alleged Cuban spies deployed in South Florida showed
 striking determination to accomplish their intelligence missions and professed
 undying loyalty to Fidel Castro and his revolution.

 This look at their lives comes from about 1,400 pages of records confiscated by
 the FBI from encrypted computer disks.

 Spontaneity had very little place in the agents' very scripted days. They kept
 detailed financial reports, listing all expenses down to kitchen cleaners ($6.88),
 haircuts ($10) and roach repellents ($6.75).

 They memorized fake life stories, held clandestine meetings at Miami
 restaurants, worried greatly about shaking surveillance, and feared that the
 Internal Revenue Service would notice their unexplained incomes.

 Their love lives suffered, too, because they feared that women would wonder why
 they used public phones -- instead of home phones -- to answer
 middle-of-the-night beeps.

 One agent asked Havana if he should have a series of girlfriends so his neighbors
 would stop questioning his solo lifestyle.

 The once-secret and encrypted reports from the agents to control officers in
 Havana, New York and Mexico City -- and back -- reveal the alleged tactics and
 techniques of Cuba's spies and their strategies to infiltrate the leading anti-Castro
 exile organizations in Miami, as well as military installations in South Florida.

 Though the Cuban spy suspects sometimes have been portrayed as bumbling --
 they never managed to get hold of any classified U.S. secrets -- the documents
 nevertheless paint a picture of disciplined covert-action officers trained in
 intelligence gathering.

 Federal prosecutors released the documents last week in response to a court
 order obtained by The Herald and other news organizations. The documents are
 key evidence in the current Miami trial of five men arrested in 1998 as suspected
 Cuban spies -- part of a larger spy ring known as La Red Avispa -- the Wasp
 Network.

 Five others accused of being spies pleaded guilty and are expected to testify
 against their former comrades.

 The men on trial in U.S. District Court acknowledge working on orders from the
 Cuban government, but they deny gathering classified information or having the
 intent to harm U.S. interests.

 Four other Wasp Network alumni managed to elude U.S. authorities and returned
 to Cuba, including Juan Pablo Roque, a former Brothers to the Rescue pilot who
 mysteriously vanished from Miami-Dade the day before a Cuban fighter plane shot
 down two Brothers planes on Feb. 24, 1996. Roque quickly resurfaced in Havana,
 saying he had been working for the Cuban government all along.

 While the suspects were under surveillance by federal agents for at least four
 yearsbefore their 1998 arrests, they had blended into the community and quietly
 infiltrated at least two major exile groups -- Brothers and Democracy Movement --
 and one military installation, the naval air station at Boca Chica near Key West.

 They had fake names and code names with documents to match. Most also had
 elaborately concocted cover stories about their past.

 Havana inserted them and four others -- including Roque -- as deep-cover moles in
 South Florida, according to the indictment.

 Their assignment: to ``penetrate'' or burrow into the community, including the
 Cuban American National Foundation and key military sites such as the Southern
 Command, which oversees U.S. military activities in Latin America and the
 Caribbean.

 Three men on trial -- Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Lavaniño and Fernando
 González -- acted as so-called illegal officers, or full-time intelligence operatives,
 prosecutors say. The two others -- U.S.-born René González and Antonio
 Guerrero -- were ``agents'' who took directions from illegal officers but had no
 direct contact with Cuba, according to prosecutors.

 The illegal agents reported to Havana by shortwave radio, beeper and computer
 messages. Occasionally, they would meet fellow spies assigned to Cuban
 diplomatic missions in New York and Mexico City, according to the records. The
 Cubans also used diplomatic pouches to move intelligence information.

 The documents show that Gerardo Hernández's journey from Havana to Miami
 began in February 1998, when Hernández, posing as a Puerto Rican named
 Manuel Viramontez, traveled from Havana to Mexico City, where he acquired fake
 documents from Cuban agents. From Mexico City, Hernández flew to Memphis,
 where a suspicious U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service airport inspector
 nearly caught him.

 In the line for U.S. citizens, Hernández presented a fake U.S. birth certificate
 showing he had been born in Cameron County, Texas, and a fake driver's license
 from Puerto Rico.

 Patricia Mancha, an INS spokeswoman in Miami, said U.S. citizens can reenter
 the United States with a birth certificate and a photo identification in case they
 don't have a passport.

 The INS inspector demanded a passport, and when Hernández said he didn't have
 one, the inspector pulled him out of the line for further questioning. The inspector
 ultimately returned the documents to Hernández and let him go.

 ``You have to get a passport. It helps,'' the inspector said.

 Havana was upset. Handlers there blamed Hernández for the episode.

 ``You proceeded too defensively,'' Havana said.

 Havana was angry, according to the messages, because covert-action experts
 there spend considerable time and money concocting cover stories for agents.

 For example, a 31-page cover story for agents claiming to be Puerto Rican
 contained ``memories'' of the ``homeland'' in case someone questioned them
 closely about the island.

 Hernández, one of those accused of being ringleaders, also was one of the most
 descriptive in his reports. He faces the most serious charge: conspiracy to
 murder the four men who died in the Brothers to the Rescue shoot-down, by
 allegedly passing along to Havana the men's flight plans.

 In one such report to Havana, he explained in detail how posing as a 30-year-old
 single man living by himself was beginning to raise eyebrows in his neighborhood.

 ``Some neighbors have commented to me that they find it strange that I, being a
 young man, apparently polite and with good characteristics, etc., live alone for so
 long,'' wrote Giraldo -- a code name that prosecutors attribute to Hernández.

 Concerned that his neighbors' questions could blow his cover, Hernández -- who
 is married in Cuba -- wondered whether Havana would prefer that he get a
 girlfriend or several girlfriends.

 Being a spy, however, made dating difficult -- particularly when he was required to
 keep rigorous radio contact with Havana in the mornings and evenings.

 Hernández ultimately discarded the notion of multiple girlfriends and proposed
 bringing his wife from Cuba instead.

 Antonio Guerrero, an alleged spy known as Lorient, also worried about romantic
 relationships. Guerrero, born of Cuban parents in Miami and now 42 years old,
 reported from the Boca Chica Naval Air Station near Key West, where he worked
 as a janitor and watched for signs of a possible U.S. invasion of Cuba.

 He also devoted considerable time to his difficult relationship with girlfriend
 Margaret Becker, a masseuse to whom the agent did not reveal his true identity.

 Becker frequently nagged Guerrero to marry her.

 ``She brings up the subject once in a while and I try to get out of it, as best as
 possible,'' Lorient wrote in one report.

 Guerrero also worried about money, a problem that often plagued other agents.

 While the agents lived in a world of capitalism, they never forgot their communist
 past. They often began their written reports with effusive revolutionary greetings.

 Detection seemed the agents' constant fear. But while they took intricate
 precautions to elude surveillance, ultimately they failed.

 For years prior to the arrests, federal agents had intercepted the agents' radio
 communications, occasionally entered their homes and apartments, and followed
 them.