Cuban Spy Attempts to Defect, Is Rejected as Risk to U.S. Security

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 illegally from Tijuana last month.

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

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

“I am not a common criminal. I am not a lion. I am not a danger to this country,” Rodriguez, dressed in a white prison jumpsuit, said in an interview Wednesday. “There is no reason to put me behind bars.”

Rodriguez, an energetic, fast-talking man of 40, is the spy U.S. authorities do not want, the would-be Cuban defector who was turned back at the U.S.-Mexico border. He later sneaked across and was arrested. Now residing in a federal cell here, he is a man without a country, his tale a bewildering account enmeshed in intrigue and three decades of hostility between Washington and the island nation run by Fidel Castro.

Is Rodriguez, as he asserts, a reformed communist hard-liner who 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?

Once, Rodriguez acknowledges, he was “more communist than Lenin,” and a Marxist ideologue who idolized Castro and applauded his revolution’s improvements in education, health care and other areas. “I was formed by Fidel Castro’s factory of the ‘new man,’ ” recalled Rodriguez, who was an impressionable 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 toward 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. He gives Castro three years before he must cede power. He says he was a moral supporter of a 1989 coup attempt against Castro that resulted in the executions of a number of plotters, who were publicly accused of drug smuggling.

On Thursday, Rodriguez is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in San Diego and argue that he should be freed while he pursues political asylum, a process that can go on for more than a year. U.S. authorities want to keep him locked up.

Rodriguez admits that he worked for the Cuban counterintelligence services for more than two decades, often traveling overseas under the cover of business. He says he was also on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency for about seven years, but was actually working against the CIA and ultimately participated in the highly embarrassing unmasking of more than two dozen CIA agents in Havana in 1987. CIA officials have declined comment on the case.

This was not the kind of welcome that Rodriguez says he anticipated when he, his wife and their 5-year-old daughter flew to Mexico last month with the intention of traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border and requesting political asylum. After initial rejection by U.S. authorities, Rodriguez and his family entered the United States illegally from Tijuana on Oct. 29. U.S. immigration authorities arrested them.

His wife, Mimna Montes de Oca Aldavert, 30, and his daughter, Paola, were released on bond; they are now residing in Beverly Hills, where Rodriguez’s father-in-law, an expatriate Cuban, is a successful businessman.

Rodriguez 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 federal functionaries. “Let them bring their lie detectors!” Rodriguez said.

What he wants to do, he says, is get on with his life and complete a book that will examine what he characterizes as an abortive coup last year against Castro. “I want all the world to know that I am here because I want to keep on fighting for the freedom of my people,” he said, shortly before federal authorities handcuffed him and led him away, back to his cell.