Cuban Spy Finds the CIA Inhospitable to Defection : Espionage: 20-year veteran of Castro’s regime wants to write book in U.S. The CIA says he’s not to be trusted.

Juan Manuel Rodriguez Camejo, who acknowledges having worked for more than 20 years as a Cuban counterintelligence agent, says he wants to defect to the United States. To that end, he crossed the border from Tijuana last month, disguising himself as an undocumented worker.

“Fidel must go,” says Rodriguez, who views himself as a product of the anti-Communist and pro-democratic tide sweeping the world.

But, in this case, there’s a twist: U.S. officials, who usually welcome Cuban defectors, say they don’t want him. They call him a security risk.

Rodriguez says U.S. spymasters are holding a grudge because, in his former guise, he helped decimate the CIA spy network in Havana. He says he does not understand the inability of U.S. officials to accept his changed attitude.

“Really, my personal experience has been very surprising,” Rodriguez, dressed in a white prison jumpsuit, said in an interview Wednesday. “I am not a common criminal. I am not a lion. I am not a danger to this country. There is no reason to put me behind bars. . . . This is to deny the dialectic transformation of mankind.”

Rodriguez, an energetic, fast-talking man of 40, now resides in a federal prison cell in San Diego as a man without a country, with a story meshed with the intrigue and enmity of three decades of hostility between Washington and the island nation run by Fidel Castro.

Is Rodriguez, as he asserts, a reformed ex-Communist hard-liner who admittedly duped U.S. intelligence services for years but who now wants to settle in the United States, work for changes in Cuba and write a tell-all book about his experiences?

Or is he, as U.S. authorities allege, a master spy who has embarked on his most grandiose gambit, attempting to pose as a Cuban defector while still working for the Castro government?

“The government of the United States doesn’t believe that he has reformed,” Joseph Ragusa, an attorney for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, told a judge last week. “Being in the United States would be an excellent cover for him.”

Responds Rodriguez, “Absurd.”

Once, he acknowledges, he was “more Communist than Lenin,” a Marxist ideologue who idolized Castro, applauded his revolutionary improvements in education, health care and other areas. “I was formed by Fidel Castro’s factory of the ‘new man,’ ” recalled Rodriguez, who was a boy when Castro and his comrades emerged from the Sierra Maestra and marched into Havana.

Now, Rodriguez describes his conversion as part of the worldwide movement towards democracy and against authoritarianism. He says he is a sworn enemy of Castro, whom he renounces as a devious tyrant presiding over a crumbling, ossified regime that has completely lost the support of the Cuban people.

“It’s time for him to go, he and all he represents,” said Rodriguez, who says he faces the firing squad should he ever return to Cuba. “His system is anachronistic; it cannot survive in today’s world. . . . Cuba has already experimented for 32 years. An entire generation was reared with the experiment of socialism, and it doesn’t work any more.”

Today, Rodriguez is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in San Diego and argue that he should be granted bond while he pursues his application for political asylum, a process that can drag on for more than a year. U.S. authorities want to keep him locked up, contending that he is a national security risk.

“He’s worked for 20 years to undermine our country, and now he wants to retire here,” said Rudy Murillo, a spokesman in San Diego for the immigration service.

Rodriguez concedes that he worked for the Cuban intelligence services for more than two decades, often traveling overseas under the cover of business travel. He says he was also on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency for about 7 years, but was actually working against the CIA and ultimately participated in the highly embarrassing unmasking of more than 2 dozen CIA “assets” in Havana in 1987.

(Officials of the CIA and other U.S. officials in Washington have generally declined to comment publicly on Rodriguez’s case, opting to provide anonymous warnings about his veracity. “He’s not to be trusted,” said one knowledgeable U.S. authority.)

This was not the kind of welcome that Rodriguez says he expected when he, his wife and the couple’s 5-year-old daughter flew to Mexico last month with the intention of traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border and requesting political asylum. They arrived from Germany, where he said they were working for a pharmaceutical company.

After extensive interrogation, U.S. officials denied Rodriguez’s asylum petition, prompting him and his family to enter the United States illegally with a group of undocumented Mexican immigrants on Oct. 29. U.S. immigration authorities arrested him and the others.

His wife, Mimna Montes de Oca Aldavert, 30, and his daughter, Paola, were released on bond. Pending the outcome of their asylum cases, both are now living in Beverly Hills, where Rodriguez’s father-in-law, an expatriate Cuban, is a successful businessman.

“All Cubans who are against the government of Castro have intrinsic confidence that they will find help here,” said Rodriguez, expressing his perplexity about his current predicament. “One feels that one will find a moral help, a spiritual help, which, in my case, is not here.”

He seems exasperated that no one from the CIA has come to debrief him, and that, instead, he has had to tell his tale to low-level functionaries of the immigration service and the FBI. “I expected that the appropriate authorities, the specialized authorities would want to come before me and analyze matters with calmness,” Rodriguez said. “Let them bring their lie detectors!”

What he wants to do, he says, is get on with his life and complete a book that he plans about what he characterizes as an abortive coup last year against Castro. The attempt resulted in the firing-squad executions of several high-ranking Cuban military officials, including Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, although Cuban authorities say they were killed for involvement in a narcotics-smuggling ring. Rodriguez says Castro used the drug-smuggling charges as cover to conceal the breadth of the attempted coup.

“Fidel has never wanted martyrs against the revolution,” said Rodriguez, who recalled meeting one of the coup leaders in January, 1989, at the Hemingway Marina in Cuba, and vowing his moral support of any effort to overthrow Castro.

Pressed as to why U.S. authorities clearly do not want him around, Rodriguez speculates that someone in the CIA must have a grudge against him. Is this not normal, he is asked, considering that, by his own admission, he helped uncover U.S. agents in Havana.

“If I am a threat to the United States, then all of the Cuban people are a threat to the United States,” Rodriguez said, explaining that many of his compatriots have undergone political transformations in recent years. “The Cuban people are changing. I want all the world to know that I am here because I want to keep on fighting for the freedom of my people.”