Gerardo Hernandez

Cuban intelligence officer Gerardo Hernandez, spymaster of the Miami-based Wasp Network, is arrested by the FBI; the September 1998 indictment names him as Manuel Viramontez, the legend under which he lived, corrected only during the trial. The prosecution's evidence includes decoded radio messages attributed to the Atencion station, the clearest public demonstration of a numbers station in operation.

A Miami jury convicts five Cuban agents, three of them intelligence officers, including spymaster Gerardo Hernandez. The trial enters into the public record how a numbers station works in practice; the sequence is documented in detail for the parallel Montes case: a voice reads groups, an agent types them into a laptop, and one-time-pad software turns them into orders.

Hernandez is convicted, including on a murder-conspiracy count tied to the 1996 shoot-down of two exile aircraft, and sentenced to two concurrent life terms and to prison terms on eleven further counts. Sentence was imposed on 12 December 2001; Cuban accounts give 14 December. He is freed in the 2014 US-Cuba prisoner exchange.

As Washington and Havana move to restore relations, Gerardo Hernandez and the remaining Cuban Five are released and flown home. In Cuba they are hailed as heroes, a reminder that the numbers station his network relied on was a real instrument of a real state.