Former U.S. official, wife admit to 30 years of spying for Cuba

Former U.S. official, wife admit to 30 years of spying for Cuba
Plea deal reached for couple recruited by intelligence operative
By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 21, 2009

A former State Department official and his wife admitted in federal
court Friday that they spied for Cuba over the past three decades,
receiving coded instructions over a shortwave radio and passing along
information to intelligence operatives in "dead drops" and
"hand-to-hand" passes.

Walter K. Myers, 72, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit espionage
and wire fraud. His wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 71, pleaded
guilty to conspiring to gather and transmit national defense information.

Under the plea deal, Walter Myers faces a mandatory sentence of life in
prison, and his wife, 6 to 7 1/2 years. Both agreed to give extensive
debriefings to U.S. law enforcement officials before they are sentenced.
No sentencing date was set.

The couple's attorney, Bradford Berenson, said in a statement after the
hearing that the Myerses were not motivated by greed but spied "out of
conscience and personal commitment."

"They always understood that they might someday be called to account for
that conduct and always have been prepared to accept full responsibility
for it," the statement said. "They have done so today."

The Myerses stood shoulder-to-shoulder at a podium for most of the
hearing, saying little beyond yes and no to questions posed by U.S.
District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton.

In a statement, Channing Phillips, the District's acting U.S. attorney,
said the plea deal helps "close the book on this couple's contemptuous
betrayal of our nation."
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Assistant U.S. Attorney G. Michael Harvey said in court that Walter
Myers was working in the State Department's Foreign Service Institute in
1978 when he went on a two-week trip to Cuba. He had been invited by a
Cuban government official, an intelligence operative, who wanted to
assess whether Myers would make a good spy, Harvey said.

In a diary of the trip, court papers show, Myers called Cuban leader
Fidel Castro "brilliant and charismatic."

About six months later, when Myers and his wife were living in South
Dakota and he was no longer a State Department employee, the Cuban
official visited them, and they agreed to become spies, prosecutors have
said. They were given code names for their communications with Cuba:
Myers became "202" and his wife became "123."

They returned to Washington, and Myers resumed working at the State
Department.

Over the years, Myers memorized secret documents or borrowed them from
work and then gave copies to Cuban agents, authorities said. The couple
also met their handlers during overseas trips. In 1995, they visited
Cuba using false names and spent an evening with Castro, court papers
allege.

They were arrested in June during an FBI sting that included an agent
posing as a Cuban spy, authorities have said.

Myers is the scion of one of Washington's most storied families. His
mother, Elsie Alexandra Carol Grosvenor Myers, was the granddaughter of
telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell.

Under the plea deal, the couple agreed to forfeit $1.7 million, the
total of Myers's salary over the years, in cash and property to the U.S.
government. That includes a prized 37-foot Malo sailboat.

Ex-U.S. official and wife admit 30 years of spying for Cuba -
washingtonpost.com (20 November 2009)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/20/AR2009112002502.html?hpid=moreheadlines