BY CAROL ROSENBERG

 Defense lawyers for three admitted Cuban spies heaped scorn on the government's case Thursday, saying the 101-day trial showed that their espionage never uncovered any U.S. national security secrets.

 Even the FBI team that shadowed the spies for years wasn't worried about the intelligence they sent to Havana, said attorney William Norris, representing agent Ramón Labañino.

 His proof: A detachment of 35 agents armed with six cameras neither arrested Labañino nor seized his encoded diskette when he silently gave it to a Cuban diplomat in the men's bathroom of a Wendy's on Long Island, N.Y.

 Instead, they documented the drop for future use, he said.

 "If you want to find out how the Navy fights, go rent a video of Top Gun,'' he said.

 "You'll learn a lot more than Tony Guerrero could see'' by watching aircraft at a Key West air base where he worked as a janitor for five years.

 Norris was ridiculing a prosecution contention that spy ring member Antonio Guerrero was endangering secret U.S. battle doctrine by watching aircraft land and take off on training exercises.

 Guerrero attorney Jack Blumenthal, meanwhile, accused prosecutors of stoking anachronistic Cold War fears by suggesting that Havana might have given the spy ring public domain reports to either China or Russia.

 "Why would Russia and China want that information? How many Russian and Chinese subs are floating around the Florida Straits?'' he asked.

 Prosecutor Caroline Heck Miller argued earlier that, to convict for espionage conspiracy, the government did not have to prove that the spies uncovered U.S. secrets, only that they agreed to try.

 `SELF-DEFENSE'

 But defense lawyers said the agents merely mined the fruits of free public information and sent home visual observations, base descriptions available to commonplace
 civilian contractors and accounts from the press or unclassified military newsletters.

 Mostly, though, they characterized the spy squad as self-defensive in nature, with a twofold task -- namely, to learn about plans by militant Cuban exiles to stage or
 support terror attacks on the island and to anticipate an island invasion by looking for any signs of a U.S. military buildup.

 American-born, Cuban-trained agent René González, who posed as a sympathetic pilot of the Democracy Movement, was part of ``Cuba's early-warning system of
 insurrection from the north,'' said lawyer Philip Horowitz.

 Defense lawyers also accused militant anti-communists in Miami, notably Brothers to the Rescue founder José Basulto, of pursuing an independent foreign policy
 designed to drag the U.S. into a war with Cuba.

 GIVING EXAMPLES

 In accusing the federal government of exaggerating the dangers of the spy ring, attorneys offered these examples:

   The agent Havana chose to spy on the Pentagon's Southern Command in Miami neither spoke nor read English and couldn't get hired as a groundskeeper to fulfill his mission of monitoring a buildup at the headquarters for U.S. military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean.

   Any motorist could drive into Boca Chica Naval Air Station at Key West, where Guerrero made $95 a week monitoring air traffic for Cuba in addition to receiving Navy civilian wages.

   FBI counterintelligence agents knew for years that Guerrero was reporting to Cuban authorities but never notified his co-workers or the base commander.

 SEEKING ACQUITTALS

 Seeking sweeping acquittals, Norris also offered a defense theory that a loophole in the law means the Cuban agents could be cleared of the charge of acting as agents of a foreign government without notifying the attorney general.

 The law states agents on temporary assignment carrying out official business internal to their homeland need not notify the U.S. Justice Department.

 Still unanswered is why the U.S. government decided to crack the ring by rounding up 10 members before dawn one day in September 1998.

 Also on trial are Fernando González, who lived in Hollywood as Rubén Campa, and Gerardo Hernández, who lived as Manuel Viramontes.

                                    © 2001