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The Alquizar raid was an American CIA operation that took place on 13 March 1981 when a team of "Black Ops" operators led by Russell Adler attacked an abandoned compound 30 miles south of Havana, Cuba, hoping to kill the Soviet spymaster Perseus and recover a stolen American nuclear bomb. The Americans failed in both regards, and CIA agent Lazar Azoulay was killed in the process.

History[]

Following the 1981 Lubyanka raid, the American CIA acquired a list of names of the Soviet Perseus spy ring's sleeper agents, discovering that Salt Lake City-based nuclear engineer Theodore Hastings, who was tied to Operation Greenlight, had recently traveled to a compound in southern Cuba. The CIA agent Jason Hudson put Hastings under total surveillance, theorizing that it would only be a matter of time before Hastings led Russell Adler's "Black Ops" team straight to the spymaster "Perseus" and the stolen Greenlight nuke. Cuban dictator Fidel Castro had agreed to hide the nuclear bomb in exchange for a peek at the hardware.

On 12 March, Adler assembled his team in West Berlin and briefed them on their target: a vacant government facility in the Cuban countryside that had become a hub of activity for Perseus and was likely the location of the stolen nuke. The next day, the team inserted into Cuba and mounted an all-out assault against the compound, killing dozens of Cuban Tropas and witnessing the Cubans massacring the scientists who had been working on reverse-engineering the bombs to obtain their launch codes, now that Perseus had succeeded in obtaining them. The Americans were able to locate a mortally wounded Hastings, who revealed that Perseus was now capable of detonating all of the Greenlight bombs with the newly-obtained codes, and the Americans rushed to apprehend Perseus before he could escape. Perseus narrowly escaped aboard a Soviet helicopter as the Americans made their way to the rooftops of the compound, and they were ordered to await extraction via sky-hook. A Cuban RPG round wounded the operatives Lazar Azoulay and Helen Park so that they could not latch onto the sky-hook, forcing the CIA operative "Bell" to hook Helen up and escape with her as a wounded Lazar was executed by the Cubans. The operation was a fiasco, with the CIA losing one of their agents (later recovering his body and burying it in Tel Aviv), and Perseus escaping to the Solovetsky Islands to broadcast the launch codes to his remaining sleeper agents. Only the CIA's interrogation of Bell - a brainwashed former Perseus agent - enabled the CIA to track Perseus down to the White Sea and destroy his base, preventing the detonation of the nukes.

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