By Rick Bragg. The New York Times. May 31, 2000
MIAMI, May 30 -- A veteran immigration official here was convicted today of espionage in a case that caused the expulsion of a Cuban diplomat and heightened political tensions between the United States and Cuba.
A jury in federal district court in Miami found the official, Mariano Faget, 54, guilty of violating the Espionage Act, including disclosure of government secrets to a boyhood friend who wanted to do business in Cuba.
Mr. Faget, an acting deputy director with 34 years of service with the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service office here, was convicted of disclosing official secrets, using those secrets for his personal use and lying to federal investigators about his foreign business ties and
his meetings with a Cuban diplomat.
"I made a mistake," Mr. Faget, who came to the United States from Cuba when he was a teenager, said when he took the stand last week in his defense.
But federal prosecutors argued that Mr. Faget, whose job involved reviewing government decisions on naturalization and asylum, had sold out his country to help a business partner and himself.
The case came as Cuban exiles in Miami protested the decision by Attorney General Janet Reno to send 6-year-old Elián González home to Cuba, and as Cubans demanded the boy's return in government-sponsored demonstrations on the island.
Mr. Faget's arrest led to the expulsion of a Cuban diplomat, Jose Imperatori, who had dealings with Mr. Faget and was accused of spying by United States officials. Cuban officials denied the accusations. Mr. Imperatori refused to leave the country and did so only after federal agents escorted
him to a Washington airport.
Mr. Faget, who faces up to 10 years in prison, is scheduled for a sentencing hearing in August.
He was arrested after a government undercover operation in February, when government agents passed phony information to him about the fictitious defection of a Cuban diplomat, and warned him that the information was secret. Mr. Faget, as a senior supervisor with the immigration service, had a
high security clearance.
Just 12 minutes after the meeting with the agents, he called a Cuban-American boyhood friend and business partner, Pedro Font, and told him the name of the Cuban official.
"Mariano Faget was a government employee willing to betray the trust of the people he was sworn to serve," Curtis Miner, an assistant United States attorney, said in his closing arguments.
Mr. Faget, who was nearing retirement, was on the board of directors with Mr. Font of America Cuba Incorporated, a corporation formed to pursue business interests in Cuba if the United States trade embargo against the island is ever lifted.
Mr. Faget told the jury last week that he called his friend because Mr. Font was supposed to meet later that day with the Cuban official named by the government agents, and he was afraid that Mr. Font would be harmed if Cuban officials thought he was somehow involved in the defection.
But the 12-member jury apparently did not accept that Mr. Font, a New York businessman, would have been in any danger from Cuban officials.
"He disclosed classified information for no better purpose than his own personal reasons, his own personal gain," Mr. Miner said. "He took it out of the realm of control of the United States government and gave it to someone else to use however they wanted."
Mr. Faget's lawyer had argued that his client was not doing anything that threatened national security and that he was only trying to help a boyhood friend.
"An honest government servant," said Edward O'Donnell, Mr. Faget's lawyer.
But prosecutors used surveillance tapes to show meetings between Mr. Faget and Cuban diplomats in a Miami bar, acts that are illegal under federal law because of Mr. Faget's job at the immigration service.
And prosecutors said that Mr. Faget had lied to federal investigators about his business interests and his contact with Cuban officials here in the United States.
Mr. Font and Mr. Faget had known each other in Cuba, where Mr. Faget's father had worked in the police force controlled by Cuba's president at that time, Fulgencio Batista. Mr. Faget and his family fled Cuba in 1959.
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