Cuban cryptographer Rolando Sarraff Trujillo: most highly valued intelligence asset
Cryptographer Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, who was part of the historic prisoner exchange, was considered most highly valued spy in the region
The CIA's Latin America Division has run many spies in Cuba, but Rolando Sarraff Trujillo was in a class all his own.
From his perch as a cryptographer in Cuba's Directorate of Intelligence, Sarraff was able to provide information that repeatedly helped the US intelligence community crack encoded messages the communist government was sending via shortwave radio. He was arrested in Cuba in 1995 and jailed for espionage.
But mystery now surrounds his whereabouts after Sarraff was publicly identified by a former intelligence official in the United States on Thursday as the unnamed spy who was traded for three Cuban intelligence agents jailed in the United States. That deal helped pave the way for the historic reopening of diplomatic relations between Washington and Cuba announced this week.
Neither Cuban nor American officials have confirmed that Sarraff was the swapped agent - hailed by National Intelligence Director James Clapper as "the most highly valued intelligence asset on Cuban soil in American history" - and it is unclear whether Sarraff is now in Cuba or the US. His parents in Cuba have not heard from their son since he was supposedly freed from jail in Havana on Wednesday.
"They are saying his name out there," his mother, Odesa Trujillo, said at her home in the capital. "I don't care where he is, just that he's in good health."
American officials said Sarraff's information contributed to the FBI's dismantling of three major spy networks in the United States. The last of them included a group of operatives known as the "Cuban Five", who were convicted of espionage and made headlines again on Wednesday when the three who were still in prison were freed as part of the dramatic spy swap.
