Cuba Refuses to Withdraw Official Accused of Spying

Cuba’s decision to defy a U.S. order expelling a consular official accused of spying may be unprecedented in diplomatic circles--and has ratcheted up already tense relations between the two nations over the Elian Gonzalez case.

“This is something brand new in diplomacy,” said Wayne S. Smith, a former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. “I don’t know of any case where the sending country says: ‘We won’t withdraw him. We’ll take it to court.’ ”

Jose Imperatori, a mid-level consular official in Washington, D.C., could be arrested if he does not leave the country by the time his diplomatic immunity expires at 12:30 p.m. Saturday.

“We still cannot find a precedent for failure to remove a diplomat once declared persona non grata,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said Wednesday, adding that any arrest or prosecution of Imperatori would be carried out by the FBI or the Justice Department.

The government of Fidel Castro has refused to recall Imperatori, calling him the “victim of a brutal provocation and a vile calumny.” In a statement, the Cubans also maintained that the expulsion order was a “smoke screen” to further delay repatriating Elian to his father.

The 6-year-old boy was rescued off the coast of Florida last Thanksgiving after a boat carrying 14 Cubans capsized during an attempt to flee the Communist island. Elian’s mother and 10 other people drowned. Since then, the boy has been at the center of a custody battle between relatives in Miami and his father back home in Cuba.

Paper Denies Envoy, INS Official Are Spies

While Cuba often bends the rules of standard diplomatic behavior, one State Department official said, a decision to defy convention in this instance seems particularly brazen.

Imperatori was ordered out of the country three days after the arrest of Mariano Faget, an Immigration and Naturalization Service supervisor, in Miami. The 54-year-old Faget is accused of divulging classified information about Cuban defectors to agents of the Cuban intelligence service. He was charged Friday with violating the espionage act.

In a long editorial in Granma, Havana’s communist daily, Cuba confirmed that Faget had met with two of its diplomats--including Imperatori--but denied that they were spies or that any classified information was exchanged. Seeking secret information from Faget, or recruiting him as an agent, “would have been clearly stupid,” the editorial stated.

But attorneys for Elian’s Miami relatives suggested that Faget’s arrest, and the fact that Imperatori accompanied the boy’s Cuban grandmothers on the first of their two visits to Miami to see the boy last month, should be the basis for INS review of its decision to repatriate the child.

“The revelation . . . that Imperatori and Faget worked together is just too much,” attorney Spencer Eig wrote in a letter to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno. Eig represents Lazaro Gonzalez, a great-uncle of Elian, who is challenging the INS’ ruling.

Jaime Suchlicki, a Cuba expert at the University of Miami, said he doubts that ties between Faget and Imperatori have any connection to the Elian case. Almost from the moment Elian was rescued, decisions on his future have been made by Reno and top INS officials in Washington.

But the arrest of Faget and the expulsion order naming Imperatori have proved useful to Castro, Suchlicki suggested. “Cuba is making a defiant statement, testing the Clinton administration,” he said.

In Cuba, that defiance has helped fuel more popular anti-American rallies. Another took place Wednesday in Havana, where tens of thousands of flag-waving demonstrators gathered in front of the U.S. Interests Sections to listen to music and shout denunciations of both what the Cuban government calls the “kidnapping” of Elian and the order ousting Cuba’s diplomat.

Cuba has insisted that Imperatori remain in the U.S. “to testify and prove full falseness of that accusation, no matter what the consequences might be.”

Smith, a fellow at Washington’s Center for International Policy who headed the U.S. Interests Section from 1979 to 1982, said that “it’s my impression that they fully intend to go to court.

“He says he’s innocent, he didn’t do anything, and then the U.S. would have to prove that he had been spying.”

INS Official Under Surveillance for Year

Federal officials in Miami have provided virtually no details of what type of information Faget may have passed on to the Cubans. He was under surveillance for about a year, according to the affidavit of FBI Agent Joe Franklin, and was monitored while meeting with and telephoning two men named as Cuban intelligence agents and a New York businessman with ties to Cuba.

Faget, a Cuban native and 34-year INS employee, was arrested after a sting operation conducted earlier this month. Undercover FBI and INS agents fed him phony information about an alleged Cuban defector, and just 12 minutes after that meeting, Faget was recorded passing the information on to the New York businessman in a telephone call from his INS office.

Faget, held without bond, is to be arraigned today.

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Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington and Times researcher Anna M. Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.