Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers spied for Cuba because they disliked U.S. foreign policy, court papers say.

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. There, 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 Western states 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.

It appears that the Myerses were not motivated by money. The authorities said that other than being reimbursed for equipment, the couple was not paid for spying. On the contrary, according to the statements cited in the complaint, which one federal magistrate said made the case against the couple “insuperable.” The couple were said to feel disdain for America’s foreign policy - Mr. Myers’s diary described watching the television news as a “radicalizing experience” - and espouse a romanticized view of Cuba’s Communist government.

According to the complaint, Mr. Myers was invited to Havana by an unnamed Cuban official who had made a presentation at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. The trip, according to Mr. Myers’s diary, had a profound effect on him. Going through the Museum of the Cuban Revolution in Havana “was a sobering experience,” Mr. Myers wrote about the trip in his diary. “Facing step by step the historic interventions of the U.S. into Cuban affairs, including the systematic and regular murdering of revolutionary leaders, left me with a lump in my throat.”

Meanwhile, Gwendolyn Steingraber was getting her own crash course in world affairs as an aide to Senator James Abourezk, a South Dakota Democrat who was one of the leading proponents for ending the United States embargo against Cuba.

By the time the F.B.I. caught up with the couple, Mr. Myers had retired from the State Department and was working part-time as a teacher at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. But according to the complaint, when an undercover agent posing as a Cuban spy greeted Mr. Myers with a cigar after class, the thrill of espionage returned.

He and Ms. Myers later met the agent in a hotel room, and said they did not want to resume full-time spying, but would be willing to work as a “reserve” force, the court document said. And they said they looked forward to sailing away to Cuba, which they referred to as “home.”


Margot Williams, Kitty Bennett and Barclay Walsh contributed research.