American Couple Found Cuba “Exciting”, Worked as Spy for Them

In what the federal prosecutor has described the spying threat as “incredibly serious”, the arrest of Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, has come out as the latest in a series of high-profile Cuban spying cases in the United States.

Surprisingly, Kendall Myers did all this not by a desire for money or other personal gain but by a changing attitude about the United States and its communist neighbor.

He found Cuba “so exciting!” as against the American system. “The abuses of our system, the lack of decent medical system, the oil companies and their undisguised indifference to public needs, the complacency about the poor, the utter inability of those who are oppressed to recognize their own condition,” he wrote in a diary entry.

By contrast, “the revolution has released enormous potential and liberated the Cuban spirit.”

Walking past exhibits in the Museum of the Revolution in Havana “left me with a lump in my throat. They don’t need to try very hard to make the point that we have been the exploiters,” he wrote.

Kendall Myers is a retired State Department official and the couple passed on secret information to the Cuban Intelligence Service for nearly three decades.

Almost 30 years ago, Kendall Myers traveled to Cuba in December 1978 on “unofficial personal travel for academic purposes”. He was 41-year-old, a contract instructor at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute and, by his own account, a disillusioned man – driven to spy.

Six months later, they were visited by a Cuban agent in South Dakota and recruited as clandestine agents. Myers was urged to find a job at either the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency.

After failing to get a job as an analyst at the CIA, Myers resumed employment with the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute. Gwendolyn worked at a branch of the Riggs National Bank.

The couple also met with Cuban President Fidel Castro in January 1995. Over the years, they had secret meetings with Cuban “handlers and representatives” in Trinidad, Tobago, Jamaica, Mexico, Brazil, Ecuador, and Argentina.

But on April 15 this year, the agent who met Kendall Myers outside his office at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies was instead a working undercover for the FBI, posing as a Cuban agent and assigned to determine the nature and scope of the Myers’ clandestine activities. The agent told Kendall Myers that he had “instructions to contact him” to get information, because of the “change that is taking place in Cuba and the new administration.”

At a meeting later that day, Kendall told the undercover agent that he opted to leave the State Department a year early because he had felt “more or less threatened” his last months at the State Department.

They told the undercover agent that their last personal contact with a Cuban agent was in Guadalajara in December 2005. Since then, they said they had received “lots of e-mails.”