Couple Indicted On Charges Of Spying For Cuba
An indictment unsealed Friday said Walter Kendall Myers worked his way into higher and higher U.S. security clearances while secretly partnering with his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, as clandestine agents so valued by the Cuban government that they once had a private four-hour meeting with President Fidel Castro.
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said that the arrest culminated a three-year investigation and that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered a “comprehensive damage assessment” to determine what he may have passed to the Cubans.
The Myerses arrest could affect congressional support for easing tensions with Cuba dating back to the Cold War. Two months ago, the Obama administration took steps to relax a trade embargo imposed on the island nation in 1962.
David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security, described the couples alleged spying for the communist government as “incredibly serious.”
Court documents indicate the couple received little money for their efforts, but instead professed a deep love for Cuba, Castro and the countrys system of government.
The documents describe the couples spying methods changing with the times, beginning with old-fashioned tools of Cold War spying: Morse code messages over a short-wave radio and notes taken on water-soluble paper. By the time they retired from the work in 2007, they were reportedly sending encrypted e-mails from Internet cafes.
The criminal complaint says changing technology also persuaded Gwendolyn Myers to abandon what she considered an easy way of passing information, by changing shopping carts in a grocery store. The document quoted her as saying she “wouldnt do it now. Now they have cameras, but they didnt then.”
Authorities say her comments came during a series of meetings with an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban spy in April. The Myerses fell for the ruse, authorities say, sharing with the agent their views of Obama administration officials that had recently taken over responsibility for Latin American policy and accepting a device to encrypt future e-mail.
The couple, who live in an apartment building in northwest Washington, were arrested Thursday and pleaded not guilty Friday in U.S. District Court. They were ordered held in jail until a detention hearing scheduled for Wednesday. A call to their home telephone was not answered. Their attorney, Thomas Green, declined to comment.
The two were charged with conspiracy to act as illegal agents of the Cuban government and to communicate classified information to the Cuban government. Each is also charged with acting as an illegal agent of the Cuban government and with wire fraud.
Kendall Myers, 72, was known by the Cubans as Agent 202 and his 71-year-old wife went by both Agent 123 and Agent E-634, according to the indictment.
The indictment says Kendall Myers disclosed to the State Department that he traveled to Cuba for two weeks in 1978, saying the trip was for personal and academic purposes. The next year, a Cuban government official visited the couple while they were living in South Dakota and recruited them to be spies, the indictment says. At Cubas direction, authorities say, Kendall Myers attempted to get jobs that would give him access to classified information.
Kendall Myers first worked as a lecturer at the Foreign Service Institute and later as a European analyst in the departments intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, from 2000 until his retirement in October 2007.
The position gave him access to extremely sensitive documents, analysis and policy papers from a variety of government agencies. The indictment says in his last year of employment, Kendall Myers viewed more than 200 intelligence reports related to Cuba.
During his time at the intelligence bureau, officials there were dealing with the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and response as well assessments in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Court documents say among the information they passed was economic intelligence, which the former intelligence official said makes up much of what information Cuba is interested in from the United States.
The indictment seeks the return of all $1.7 million Kendall Myers earned in his State Department career, along with his $174,867 rollover IRA account.