Accused spy worked for PUC
Woman charged with helping Cuba also served as aide to S.D. senator
Steve Young
syoung@argusleader.com
A woman charged along with her husband with spying for Cuba the past
three decades worked at one time for South Dakota's Public Utilities
Commission and as an aide to then-Sen. James Abourezk.
Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 71, and her husband, Walter Kendall Myers,
72, were arrested last week in Washington, D.C., and charged with
conspiring to act as illegal agents and to communicate classified
information to the Cuban government.
The pair, accused of passing information by shortwave radio and
correspondence exchanged in grocery stores, among other things, have
pleaded not guilty and are jailed pending further court proceedings.
For PUC officials who worked with Gwendolyn Steingraber when she was the
agency's deputy director for fixed utilities from early 1979 to December
1980, the news was stunning.
"It is so strange," said Greg Rislov, an adviser to the commission who
started with the agency in 1976. "I mean, how many people know
international spies at any point in their lives? You look at it and
think, 'My gosh, what a strange thing to happen.' "
Former PUC Commissioner Ken Stofferahn, now of Lincoln, Neb., was
equally surprised by the arrest.
"I was very shocked," Stofferahn said. "I knew her as being a very swell
person. I still think she is. Obviously, she got mixed up with a lot of
other activities."
Steingraber had been working as a legislative aide for Abourezk when
Stofferahn, elected to the PUC, brought her and three other Abourezk
staff members to Pierre in 1979.
"There were three or four of Abourezk's lower staff people who either
were from South Dakota or were familiar with South Dakota," Stofferahn
recalled. "I knew them, so when I was elected to the commission, they
came on board with me."
Abourezk could not be reached Monday to talk about Steingraber's work
for him. But the former senator told the Washington Post Saturday that
he liked both of the Myerses.
"She is a very good woman," Abourezk told the Post. "And I always
thought he was a decent human being."
In April 1977, Abourezk and then-Sen. George McGovern helped organize a
trip to Cuba involving the combined South Dakota State and University of
South Dakota men's basketball teams. Though a group of players, coaches
and fans went to Cuba, Steingraber and Myers weren't among them, said
Dave Martin, who was SDSU's sports information director at the time and
now is employed by the Argus Leader.
Stofferahn and Rislov said Steingraber handled consumer affairs and
complaints in the PUC and spent a lot of time traveling the state,
showing people how to build solar collectors at commission-sponsored
workshops.
"She was very nice, very soft-spoken," Rislov said. "She wasn't the type
that you were going to get into a political argument with."
Fidel Castro called the case "strange" Saturday and questioned whether
the timing of their arrests was politically motivated.
"Doesn't the story of Cuban spying seem really ridiculous to everyone?"
Castro asked, without commenting on its validity.
If the couple had been watched that long, "why were they not arrested
before?" Castro asked.
In an essay read by a newscaster on state television, the former Cuban
leader noted that the couple were taken into custody only 24 hours after
the Organization of American States voted to lift a decades-old
suspension of Cuba's membership in that group.
Though the U.S. ultimately supported the OAS vote Wednesday, the
administration of President Obama initially wanted to see more
democratic reforms on the communist island before Cuba was readmitted.
Castro called the OAS vote "a defeat for United States diplomacy."
In court papers related to their arrest, Myers is said to have begun
working for the U.S. State Department as a contract instructor at its
Foreign Service Institute in 1977. Those papers say he traveled to Cuba
in late 1978 after receiving an invitation from an official at the Cuban
mission in New York. His guide in the communist country was an
unidentified Cuban intelligence official, the FBI said in court papers.
Within six months, Myers was no longer a State Department employee and
was living in Pierre with Steingraber.
Both Rislov and Stofferahn remember the man they called "Kendall" as
being brilliant
"He was kind of a professor of Western European studies, I believe,"
Stofferahn recalled. "I think he had taught diplomats at the State
Department.
"As I recall, he didn't work anywhere there in Pierre. In fact, I
believe he was working on a book about Britain Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain."
Court papers say that before the two left Pierre, an official from the
Cuban United Nations mission in New York visited them in South Dakota,
and they agreed to become spies. They were given code names for their
correspondence and radio traffic with Cuba. Myers became "202," and his
wife became "123."
All of which leaves Stofferahn, Rislov and others shaking their heads.
"It's like, who knows, maybe I worked with the current version of Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg," said Rislov, referring to an American couple
executed in 1953 after being found guilty of passing information about
the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.
"It's extremely weird," Rislov continued. "Everybody is shocked."
The Associated Press contributed to this story. Reach reporter Steve
Young at 331-2306.
http://www.argusleader.com/article/20090609/NEWS/906090311/1001/news
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