NYT Profile: Couple’s Capital Ties Said to Veil Spying for Cuba

[JudyInTheHeartland]

June 19, 2009
Couple’s Capital Ties Said to Veil Spying for Cuba
By GINGER THOMPSON

WASHINGTON — She was twice divorced and fresh out of South Dakota when she fell for his worldly sophistication. He came from one of this city’s most privileged families, and admired her work helping ordinary people.

Together, Gwendolyn and Kendall Myers set out to give the second half of their lives new meaning. At first, disillusioned with the pace of change in Washington, the great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, who at the time was a State Department contract employee, and the housewife turned political activist moved to South Dakota, where they embraced a counterculture lifestyle, even growing marijuana in the basement. They marched for legalized abortion, promoted solar energy, and repaired relations with six children from previous marriages.

When the wide-open spaces of the West quickly grew too small, the couple returned to Washington a year later, renewing their ties to the establishment that they had rejected.

But the government says the real reason for the Myerses’ 1980 return was to spy for Cuba. In a complaint that reads in parts like a novel, federal prosecutors allege that Mr. Myers, now 72, used his top-secret clearance as a State Department analyst to steal classified information from government files for nearly three decades, and that Ms. Myers, 71, who worked as a bank clerk, helped pass the information to Cuban handlers. They were arrested earlier this month and are being held without bail.

The strongest argument in support of the government’s case may have been made by the Myerses themselves. In the 40-page complaint they are quoted telling an undercover F.B.I. agent how much they admired Fidel Castro, how they sent secret dispatches to Havana over short-wave radio, dropped packages to handlers in shopping carts at local grocery stores, traveled across Latin America to meet with Cuban agents and used false documents to travel to Havana for an evening with Mr. Castro.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/world/19spies.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=print