Disdain for U.S. policies may have led to alleged spying for Cuba

WASHINGTON — He was a courtly State Department intelligence analyst from a prominent family who loved to sail and peruse the London Review of Books. Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies, but to his liberal neighbors in Washington, it was nothing out of the ordinary. "We were all appalled by the Bush years," one said.

What Walter Kendall Myers kept hidden, according to documents unsealed in court Friday, was a long-standing anger toward his country, an anger that allegedly made him willing to spy for Cuba for three decades.

"I have become so bitter these past few months. Watching the evening news is a radicalizing experience," he wrote in his diary in 1978, referring to what he described as greedy U.S. oil companies, inadequate health care and "the utter complacency of the oppressed" in America. On a trip to Cuba, federal law-enforcement officials said in legal filings, Myers found a new inspiration: the communist revolution.

Myers, 72, and his wife, Gwendolyn, 71, pleaded not guilty Friday to charges of conspiracy, being agents of a foreign government and wire fraud. Their arrest left friends and former colleagues slack-jawed.

The Myerses never talked about Cuba or gave any hint of subversive activities, acquaintances said.

"Anyone who knows him finds it baffling and finds this completely out of character," said David Calleo, director of European studies at Johns Hopkins' international-affairs school, a friend of Myers for nearly 40 years.

Larry MacDonald, who lives at the marina in Anne Arundel County, Md., where the Myerses docked their 38-foot sloop, said the two were admired for their intelligence and graciousness: "When I heard they were arrested, I felt like they had arrested Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny."

Fidel praises them

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro said in an article published Saturday on the CubaDebate Web site that "I can't help but admire their disinterested and courageous conduct on behalf of Cuba."

The State Department and intelligence community are investigating how much damage the alleged spying may have done. Myers had worked as a European political expert for more than 20 years at the State Department, and had been associated with its Bureau of Intelligence and Research from 1988 until his retirement in 2007.

James Cason, who headed the U.S. interests section in Cuba from 2002 to 2005, said the case was serious because Myers had one of the highest clearances. "If you can get someone into the intelligence bureau, you can have access to everyone's intelligence, not only ours but of allies. The question is, what did they (Cuba) do with it?" he said. "Did it stay with them, or was it given to other countries, as well?"

But an official who previously worked in the bureau said the case was probably not as damaging as that of Aldrich Ames, the CIA counterintelligence chief who passed along extensive information about U.S. intelligence operations in Russia. Myers would not have had access to the names of U.S. spies in Cuba, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Myers, who goes by his middle name, Kendall, grew up in Washington, the eldest of five children. His father, Walter, was a renowned heart surgeon; his mother, Carol, was the daughter of Gilbert Grosvenor, the president of the National Geographic Society, and the granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

Myers went to prep school at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania and graduated from Brown University. He went on to get a Ph.D in European history from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

He got his first taste of spying while serving in the U.S. Army from 1959 through 1962, according to friends. Fluent in Czech, he was stationed in Germany, where he monitored broadcasts from what was then known as Czechoslovakia, which was under Communist rule. He went on to teach at Johns Hopkins' international school, and in 1977 become a contract instructor at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute.

During those years, his life was rocked by tragedy and difficulties, friends said. One November night in 1975, he was driving a car that slammed into a 16-year-old girl, killing her. Myers felt terrible about the crash, friends said. His marriage to his first wife, Maureen Walsh, ended in divorce in 1977. They have a son and daughter, Myers' only children.

Love for revolution

In 1978, he visited Cuba for two weeks, authorities said. He told his supervisors he had been invited there for an academic trip by the country's United Nations mission. His guide on the island was a Cuban intelligence officer, authorities said.

The son of privilege fell in love with the communist revolution, according to diary entries released in court.

The next year, Myers moved to South Dakota, apparently to teach, friends said. He lived with a woman who would become his second wife, Gwendolyn Trebilcock, a legislative aide for then-Sen. John Abourezk, a Democrat, in her hometown of Aberdeen.

An official from the Cuban mission visited the couple in South Dakota and recruited them, officials say. He asked Myers to join the State Department or the CIA, authorities said. Gwendolyn Myers would later tell an undercover FBI agent, posing as a Cuban operative, that her husband chose State because he was not "a very good liar."

In the succeeding years, as the couple were allegedly passing information to the Cubans, they never indicated any interest in the island, according to friends and colleagues.

"I never heard him say anything about Latin America at all, ever, ever," said a retired Foreign Service officer who worked with Myers and who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The couple told the FBI agent during a series of meetings in April 2009 that they were worried about being caught. They allegedly used code IDs: Kendall Myers was "202," while his wife, who worked for a bank, was "123."

In 1995, they flew to Mexico and used fake identification to fly to Cuba, where they met Fidel Castro, they told the agent.

Myers and his wife told the agent they passed along information over a shortwave radio given to them by the Cubans, and by exchanging shopping carts with handlers in grocery stores, the documents said. In recent years, they used encrypted e-mails sent from Internet cafes, they told the agent.

Despite what the couple described as their paranoia about detection, court documents reveal that they readily opened up to an FBI undercover agent who approached Kendall Myers two months ago.

The couple told the agent they eventually wanted to sail to Cuba, according to court documents. "Our idea is to sail home," Kendall Myers said.