US spy case a 'ridiculous tale': Cuba's Fidel Castro
AFP
HAVANA- Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dismissed US charges that a couple arrested in Washington had been spying for Cuba as a "ridiculous tale" in an article out Saturday.
But the 82-year-old revolutionary did not refute accusations that the retired State Department official with top-secret security clearance and his wife who were arrested Thursday had spied for communist Cuba for almost 30 years.
"Don't you all think this story about Cuban espionage is quite a ridiculous tale?" Castro wrote in an article posted on the Cubadebate website.
Walter Kendall Myers, 72, and his wife Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 71, are accused of conspiracy to hand over classified information to Cuba, serving as an illegal agent for a foreign government and wire fraud, the Department of Justice said Friday.
"The confrontation with the United States is ideological and has nothing to do with the security of that country," Castro said.
"What in one way or another contributes to protect the lives of Cuban citizens in the face of terrorist plans... they did following imperatives of their own conscience and deserve, in my judgment, all the honors of the world," Castro wrote.
Castro wrote that it was "curious" that the story emerged just 24 hours after "the defeat suffered" by US diplomacy when the Organization of American States cleared the way for Cuba to rejoin the hemispheric body at a general assembly meeting in Honduras.
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