...for spying on behalf of Cuba.

Susan

Couple Indicted on Charges of Spying for Cuba

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department charged Friday that a former State Department analyst and his wife worked as spies for Cuba for nearly 30 years, using a short-wave radio to pass secret diplomatic information to their Cuban handlers.

Officials said the couple, Walter Kendall Myers, 72, and Gwendolyn S. Myers, 71, received little in the way of compensation from the Cubans except for the short-wave radio and some travel expenses. Rather, the officials said, the couple appears to have been driven by their strong affinity for Cuba and their bitterness toward “American imperialism.”

“We think they did it because they love Cuba,” said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case.

The State Department said that it would be conducting reviews into the case to determine what damage may have been done and how internal security measures might be improved. David Kris, the assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department, called the Myers’ activity for Cuba “incredibly serious.”

The Myers, who live in Washington, were arrested on Thursday and charged in a grand jury indictment unsealed Friday with serving as illegal agents of the Cuban government and wire fraud. A defense lawyer declined comment on the charges.

The case has been under investigation for three years, but it intensified two months ago, when an undercover agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, posing as a Cuba agent, approached Mr. Myers on a street here with a cigar and birthday greetings from Cuba. That led to a series of meetings in which the Justice Department said that Mr. Myers and his wife made incriminating admissions about their decades-long work for Cuba.

Mr. Myers began working as a contract instructor at the State Department in 1977 and rose to the position of senior analyst with top secret security clearance, specializing in European affairs. He retired from the department in 2007.

In the indictment, the Justice Department said that Mr. Myers examined about 200 intelligence reports that dealt with Cuba in 2006 and 2007, many of them classified or top secret reports that were unrelated to his own duties at the State Department.

While some of the material that the government says the Myerses passed on to Cuba apparently related to State Department personnel and internal policy matters, the indictment does not detail the bulk of the material or the sensitivity of it.

The indictment and the government’s supporting material say that the Myerses were first recruited to work as spies during an academic trip that they took to Cuba in 1978 at the invitation of the Cuban government.

In a diary entry that the Justice Department said Mr. Myers wrote at the time of the trip, he expressed his passion for Cuba and its Communist revolutionary goals and his distaste for “American imperialism” and the United States’ indifference to medical care, the poor and other basic public needs.

“Cuba is so exciting!” he wrote, adding that “the revolution has released enormous potential and liberated the Cuban spirit.”

The government alleged that soon after their return to the United States, the Myerses began using Morse code, encrypted messages and a short-wave radio given to them by the Cubans to pass sensitive diplomatic information back to Havana. They met Fidel Castro on a clandestine trip to Cuba in 1995, and they also made trips over the years to meet Cuban contacts in Trinidad and Tobago, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Jamaica, the government charged.

It appears from government documents that suspicions among American counter-intelligence officials about a possible security leak within the State Department first led the authorities to focus on Mr. Myers two or three years ago.

This April, an undercover agent from the F.B.I., posing as a Cuban official, approached Mr. Myers outside the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, where he taught. The agent said he had instructions to contact him concerning the thawing diplomatic changes in the air between Cuba and the United States. The agent offered Mr. Myers a cigar and wished him a happy birthday.

The undercover agent directed Mr. Myers to search out State Department information about Cuba, and at one in a series of follow-up meetings, Mr. Myers and his wife told the undercover agent that they hoped to “sail home” to Cuba some day on their sailboat, the government said.

The couple also expressed some mixed emotions, saying that they were “burned out” by their clandestine activity yet wanted to continue to help Cubans because of their strong ties.

“It’s forever,” the affidavit quoted Mr. Myers as telling the agent. “You know, it’s like Fidel,” he said. “It’s forever.”

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin