A jailed Cuban spy, his wife and their baby

It was no easy feat to get a vial of frozen sperm from Gerardo Hernández, a Cuban spy serving two life sentences in California, to Panama, where his wife, desperate to have a baby, was artificially inseminated.

Yet the matter became an urgent priority over the past year for the small group of Cuban and U.S. officials who were secretly working to broker a historic thaw in relations. Facilitating the pregnancy, one of the strangest subplots in the annals of secret negotiations between Washington and Havana, fell largely on the shoulders of a Senate staffer who had become central to laying the groundwork for the change in U.S.-Cuba policy.

Hernández was one of three Cuban spies who returned home last Wednesday to a hero’s welcome as part of a deal that included the release of Alan Gross, the U.S. subcontractor imprisoned in Havana for five years. Photographs of Hernández, who had been in U.S. prisons for 16 years, and his pregnant wife became the talk of the town in Havana. He meekly told reporters that the baby was his but offered no details.

There are plenty of unsung heroes who helped bring about the shift President Barack Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba announced last week. But no one seems to have delivered as much as Tim Rieser, a powerful yet unassuming Senate staffer who advises Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., on foreign policy and helps put together the State Department budget each year. Besides taking on the unexpected sperm diplomacy task, Rieser worked tirelessly to improve the treatment of Gross, who had become despondent and suicidal.

“Tim was one of the people who took upon himself the responsibility of dealing with the human side of the situation, talking to Alan on a regular basis during his worst moments,” said Ricardo Zúñiga, a senior White House official who was one of the lead negotiators of the deal. “He never wavered in his effort to push the administration to do as much as we could as fast as we could to seek Alan’s release.”

Cuban officials started pressing the U.S. government to help Hernández and his wife, Adriana Pérez, now 44, conceive a child in 2010, when an embarrassed Cuban diplomat raised the issue with a U.S. counterpart in Washington, according to an official involved with the exchange. It was a long shot. The Federal Bureau of Prisons doesn’t allow conjugal visits, and U.S. officials suspected Pérez had also been trained as a Cuban spy.

When Leahy, one of the chief advocates of a change in policy with Cuba, visited Havana in February 2013, Cuban officials asked if he would meet with Pérez. Leahy, his wife, Marcelle Pomerleau Leahy, and Rieser met with her in a Havana hotel room. “It was an emotional meeting,” Patrick Leahy recalled in an interview. “She wanted to have a baby before she got too old. She was deeply in love with her husband.”

When they returned to Washington, Leahy was convinced that helping the couple was the right thing to do on humanitarian grounds and to improve the prospect of a diplomatic breakthrough that had eluded numerous administrations over the decades.

“Tim, we need to figure out how to do this,” Leahy recalls telling his staffer.

Rieser is no stranger to complex tasks. He was one of the architects of the 1992 law that banned land mines. He also helped draft the so-called Leahy Law, which was passed in 1998 and bans the United States from providing military assistance to foreign armies that violate human rights without being held to account. His skills and authority on Capitol Hill are so well respected that a senior State Department official affectionately referred to him as “Secretary of State Rieser.”

When the Bureau of Prisons told Rieser that a conjugal visit was out of the question, he asked about artificial insemination and learned that it had been authorized once before. He got top officials at the State Department and the Justice Department to sign off on the arrangement.

“So then the question became how to make it happen,” Rieser said in an interview.

Once everyone was on board, Cuban officials collected a sperm sample from Hernández and transported it to Panama. The initial attempt to get Pérez pregnant failed. A second one, around eight months ago, worked.

“I wanted to make clear to them that we cared about the treatment of their people, just as we expected them to care about the treatment of ours,” Rieser, 62, said.

As Rieser worked to facilitate Hernández’s wish, he persuaded Cuban officials to improve the conditions of Gross’ imprisonment. Gross had gone on a hunger strike this year and threatened to commit suicide if he wasn’t released soon. Rieser got the Cubans to turn the lights off in Gross’ room at night and to give him access to a computer and a printer. Rieser was also allowed to speak to Gross by phone many times over the past few months. “If Alan Gross had lost hope, committed suicide, the whole thing would have fallen apart,” Leahy said.

When Obama called Leahy after the deal was announced last week to thank him for his persistence and counsel, the senator said much of the credit belonged to a little-known former public defender in his office, who had never sought the limelight.

“I could not have done it without Tim Rieser,” he told the president.

Ernesto Londoño is an editorial writer for the New York Times.