By Ellis Berger, Sun-Sentinel. Web-posted: 10:53 p.m. May 29, 2000
BULLETIN: A verdict has been returned in the espionage trial of INS official Mariano Faget and will be read in open court at 1:30 p.m. today, court officials say.
MIAMI -- The somber, middle-aged man in the charcoal gray suit will hold his right hand over his heart today and smile affectionately at his wife seated eight feet away as he enters the high-ceiling chamber.
Pitty Faget would be sitting even closer if she could, but for security reasons federal marshals are keeping the first row clear of spectators at her 54-year-old husband's espionage trial.
Whether Mariano Faget repeats the gesture of love and reassurance at the end of the day, as he has done for the past two weeks, depends on what the 11 women and one man in the jury box think he had in mind when he revealed secret information to a lifelong friend.
Assistant U.S. attorneys Richard Gregorie and Curtis Miner say Faget surely thought his actions could harm the United States or help Cuba when he told media mogul Pedro Font, in recorded telephone conversations, that a contact of theirs was a double agent about to defect from Fidel Castro's
communist dictatorship.
But defense attorneys Edward O'Donnell and Diane Ward maintain that all Faget had in mind was Font's safety if Cuban authorities jumped to the erroneous conclusion that his trusted friend played a role in the diplomat's defection.
The jurors, unable to reach a verdict Thursday when they got the case from U.S. District Judge Alan S. Gold, resume their deliberations today in the trial of the senior official with the Immigration and Naturalization Service who faces 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 if convicted.
Besides the one count of espionage, Faget is charged with using classified government documents for his own gain, lying to the Miami chief of the FBI and withholding information about foreign business connections.
Meanwhile, the government presented the jury with an elaborate circumstantial case that he passed on the classified information to Font because the two were involved in a conspiracy to violate the Cuban embargo act, something Faget is not charged with.
Nor has the government charged Font, who the FBI says is "possibly a Cuban agent," or any of the other directors in a Florida corporation called America-Cuba Inc., that was established to do business in Cuba after the embargo.
The jury also heard an FBI special agent say Faget could have avoided arrest and prosecution if he had implicated Font and been willing to work under cover against the Cuban Interests Section in Washington.
Constrasting styles
The two sides offered sharply contrasting styles Thursday during nearly four hours of closing arguments in which the prosecution insisted this was a simple case of greed over loyalty, and the defense countered that Faget was unwittingly dragged into a spy case gone amok.
Handling the first phase of the prosecution's two-part closing, Miner never raised his voice as he led the jury step by step through the evidence, beginning with Faget captured on hidden video disclosing the classified information.
Miner asked the jury to consider the credibility of Faget's alibi that he feared for Font's safety and whether his statements make sense. More to the point, Miner said, does it even matter when the video says it all?
The information Faget disclosed to Font was concocted by the FBI and given to him to see what he would do with it. The bait was a Cuban diplomat who agents knew had met several times with Font and Faget. In fact, the only reason the FBI had been watching Faget for the past year was he turned
up having a drink with the diplomat, who was under surveillance as a known Cuban intelligence operative.
Miner insisted Faget could easily have avoided his predicament. All he had to do was be up front when Hector Pesquera, special agent in charge of the FBI in Miami who pulled off the sting, asked for his help with the paperwork to get the diplomat out of Cuba.
"'You're not going to believe this,'" Miner suggested Faget could have said, "'but I met this guy before in Greenwich, Connecticut, and we've met a couple times down here.' Tell him Font is about to meet with his replacement."
Instead, Faget volunteered to Pesquera that he met the defector just once by accident at a cocktail party in Miami, when the FBI knew better.
'Not some rookie"
Gregorie completed the prosecution closing in a loud, contemptuous tone as he exhorted the jury: "This is not some rookie. This is not someone being presented with secure information for the first time. The crime is right there in front of you."
That, O'Donnell screamed in closing, was precisely the point. By the admission of the government's own witnesses, O'Donnell argued, Faget never compromised a single one of 77 classified files entrusted to him during an unblemished career with INS.
Instead of following him and tapping his telephones, why didn't the agents give him the benefit of the doubt he deserved, O'Donnell said. "Why didn't they ask, 'Can you tell us what's it all about?'"
One unanswered puzzle that O'Donnell and Ward want the jury to ponder is why the FBI videotaped what the prosecution describes as a secluded and clandestine meeting between Faget and an alleged Cuban spy, but did not bother to record their conversation. While the FBI set up intricate
surveillance, including still photos and videos, of Font with the same Cuban diplomat, the agency did not record a word of their three-hour lunch at New York's 21 Club.
Also, after using a body bug to pick up Faget's 30-minute conversation with the INS official who drove him to FBI headquarters, the tapes shut down during six hours of interrogation that ended with Faget's Feb. 17 arrest for lying and being uncooperative.
To find Faget guilty of espionage, Gold has instructed the jurors, it is not enough to determine that he revealed to an unauthorized person information entrusted to him about national security.
He must also have "had reason to believe the information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign country," Gold said.
Ellis Berger can be reached at eberger@sun-sentinel.com or 305-810-5004.
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