Disguise:

Santos said that ring, commanded by a rebel known by the alias Cesar, was tricked into believing that the FARC’s leader had called for the hostages to be brought to him. Yesterday, two white helicopters arrived in a jungle clearing where the hostages were being held. The men in the helicopters looked like guerrillas, Betancourt later said, describing details of the rescue at the military airport. “Absolutely surreal,” she said, noting that some of the men who got off the helicopter wore T-shirts emblazoned with the iconic image of the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. “I thought this was the FARC,” she said.

The political harm of this hostage rescue to the commies is much greater than if there had been a firefight or some Entebbe-style rescue; the rebels weren’t just defeated, they were humiliated, made to look like complete fools.