Cited in Spy Case, Envoy Balked at Departure Order

                  By Karen DeYoung
                  Washington Post Staff Writer

                  Cuban diplomat Jose Imperatori was forcibly expelled last night from the
                  United States after he refused to comply with a 1:30 p.m. deadline to
                  leave, saying he wanted to stay to clear his name of espionage charges.

                  FBI agents arrived at Imperatori's Bethesda apartment building at 8:40
                  p.m. Two agents spent five minutes inside his apartment before returning to
                  the basement garage with the diplomat, who wore a blue trench coat,
                  carried no luggage and was not handcuffed. Accompanied by his attorney,
                  former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke (D), he was driven to Reagan
                  National Airport, where a bureau plane was waiting to fly him to Montreal.
                  He was booked on a Cubana Airlines flight tonight from Montreal to
                  Havana.

                  State Department spokesman James P. Rubin released a statement saying
                  Imperatori was being expelled from the United States "for not voluntarily
                  departing by the appointed time."

                  The State Department issued the expulsion order on Feb. 19 after accusing
                  Imperatori of being the Cuban government contact of a U.S. Immigration
                  and Naturalization Service official in Miami charged with spying for
                  Havana.

                  In an unprecedented act of diplomatic defiance, Cuba replied that
                  Imperatori would not leave and that he was prepared to testify that both he
                  and the INS official, Mariano Faget, had been falsely accused.

                  The 48-year-old vice counsel at the Cuban Interests Section in
                  Washington told reporters yesterday morning that he was the "victim of a
                  major slander." Not only was the espionage allegation against him
                  "absolutely false," Imperatori said, but INS official Faget, who was
                  arrested Feb. 17, "is innocent . . . and I can help to prove it."

                  Imperatori said he had resigned early yesterday from his job at the Cuban
                  Interests Section, Havana's diplomatic mission here, and given up all claims
                  of diplomatic immunity. He said he would "not resist arrest, not even if I am
                  handcuffed and jailed. . . . My truth will be my shield."

                  He said he would "remain in my apartment" and would go on a hunger
                  strike "until I have been absolutely cleared of the accusation brought
                  against me." Imperatori's wife and 3-year-old son left the country for Cuba
                  on Friday night.

                  Yesterday's events--the first time a foreign diplomat has tried to defy an
                  expulsion order--were the latest turn in an increasingly convoluted
                  diplomatic dance between Cuba and the United States. The Cuban
                  government has said that the charges against Faget--and the allegation that
                  Imperatori was his Cuban government contact--were part of a plot to
                  impede the return to Cuba of 6-year-old castaway Elian Gonzalez.

                  Faget's arrest came four days before a scheduled federal court hearing on
                  efforts by Elian's Miami relatives to prevent the enforcement of an INS
                  order to return the boy to his father in Cuba.

                  Cuba has been vague on the exact relationship between the two situations,
                  which the United States says are unrelated. But the day after Faget's
                  arrest, lawyers for the Gonzalez family in Miami wrote Attorney General
                  Janet Reno suggesting that he might have interfered in the case and asking
                  that all efforts to send Elian home be postponed until any Faget
                  involvement could be clarified. The Elian hearing was postponed until
                  March 6 because the assigned judge suffered a stroke last weekend.

                  "There is a connection," Cuban Interests Section head Fernando Remirez
                  said yesterday. Remirez said Cuba was counting on the "broad number of
                  people in the United States [who] want a change in relations with Cuba" to
                  discern the falsity of the espionage allegation.

                  In presenting its preliminary evidence against Faget, the FBI said he had
                  met regularly with Cuban officials and passed information to them relating
                  to INS asylum applications. Two days after his arrest, the State
                  Department informed the Cuban government that Imperatori had a week
                  to leave the country.

                  Remirez immediately issued a statement saying Imperatori was innocent
                  and would not leave. The United States charged that the refusal was a
                  violation of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic matters and demanded
                  his withdrawal by yesterday's deadline.

                  Schmoke said Imperatori had given up his immunity and refused to leave
                  because he "wanted to make it very clear that he in no way is involved in
                  espionage, that the Cuban Interests Section is not involved in espionage,
                  and he wants to work together" with U.S. authorities to resolve the "great
                  injustice" done to himself and to Faget.

                  Imperatori noted that this was the first time an interests section official had
                  been accused of espionage, and that the Cuban government had explicitly
                  forbidden diplomats in Washington to spy. Officials at Cuba's United
                  Nations mission in New York have previously been accused of espionage.

                  "I feel it is my duty" to help clear Faget, Imperatori said.

                  Remirez said the interests section supported Imperatori "100 percent" and
                  would pay his legal bills. Schmoke, who last month joined the Washington
                  law firm Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, was hired to represent Imperatori
                  early last week. During his last term as Baltimore mayor, Schmoke made a
                  number of official trips to Cuba and arranged cultural, academic and health
                  care exchanges, as well as an exchange of baseball games between the
                  Baltimore Orioles and the Cuban national team.

                  In trying to determine its legal options in the face of the Cuban defiance
                  over the past week, the Justice Department considered detaining
                  Imperatori, expelling him or ignoring him until it decided what to do.

                  Throughout the week, the Cuban government issued statements giving its
                  version of what it described as an open and innocent relationship between
                  Imperatori and Faget. It has said that Imperatori's predecessor in the
                  consular section, Luis Molina, had met Faget last year through New York
                  businessman Pedro Font. Font and Faget were friends, both Cuban-born
                  sons of officers in the army of Cuba's pre-Castro government who came to
                  this country as teenagers.

                  Cuba said that first Molina, who has returned to Cuba, and then Imperatori
                  visited with Faget on several occasions when they were in Miami on official
                  business and that they spoke on the telephone. Their conversations, Cuba
                  said, were about two subjects: INS business, in which Faget complained
                  about Cuba's emigration policies and strongly supported U.S. policy, and
                  Faget's hopes of investing in Cuba after his retirement.

                  Cuba and the United States agree that Faget was arrested after a sting
                  operation in which he was told that a senior Cuban official wished to defect
                  and was intercepted moments later transmitting this information to Font.
                  The FBI has alleged that Faget intended Font to pass that information to
                  the Cuban government.

                  Cuba has said that the FBI told Faget that the defecting official was
                  Imperatori and that Faget's telephone call to Font was to convey
                  amazement at the actions of their mutual friend.

                  Staff writers Ruben Castaneda and Petula Dvorak contributed to this
                  report.

                           © Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company