Another Cuban/shortwave spy story

[Fansome]

http://www.thestate.com/166/story/815709.html

thestate.com
Friday, Jun 5, 2009
Posted on Fri, Jun. 05, 2009
Ex State Department official, wife charged as Cuban spies
Lesley Clark
Miami Herald

WASHINGTON — A former State Department official with a top secret security clearance and his wife have been arrested on charges of serving as spies for the Cuban government for nearly 30 years, the Justice Department said Friday.

The couple is also charged with conspiring to provide classified U.S. information to Havana.

According to a criminal complaint unsealed Friday in Washington, Walter Kendall Myers, 72, and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 71, were charged with conspiracy to act as illegal agents and pass along classified information to the Cuban government.

The affidavit suggests they were active as recently as the April 2009 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. They're also charged with acting as illegal agents of the Cuban government and with wire fraud.

Justice officials said the couple, both Washington, D.C., residents, were arrested Thursday by the FBI and made their initial appearances Friday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. They pleaded not guilty.

The department says Kendall Myers began working for the State Department in 1977 and traveled to Cuba in December 1978 for "academic purposes'' after an invitation from the Cuban Mission to the U.N.. in New York. It says they were visited by the mission official while living in South Dakota and agreed in 1979 "to serve as clandestine agents of the Cuban government.''

The Justice Department alleges that the Cuban Intelligence Service then directed Myers to resume his employment with the State Department "or the CIA.''

It says Myers returned to Washington with his wife and got a job at the State Department in a position that required a top secret security clearance.

"The clandestine activity alleged in the charging documents, which spanned nearly three decades, is incredibly serious and should serve as a warning to any others in the U.S. government who would betray America's trust by serving as illegal agents of a foreign government,'' said David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security.

The arrest comes as President Barack Obama has sought to improve relations with the Cuban government. U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., himself a Cuban refugee, called on the administration to halt "any further diplomatic outreach to the regime,'' including the resumption of planned migration talks between the two countries, "until the U.S. Congress has a full accounting of the damage these individuals have caused to our national security."

"This is a stark reminder that just 90 miles from our shores, there is a government hostile toward the people of the United States, a regime that seeks to do us harm and works against our interests around the world,'' Martinez said.

According to the affidavit, the Justice Department said Kendall Myers told an FBI source "that he typically removed information from the State Department by memory or by taking notes, although he did occasionally take some documents home.''

The department said Myers said that he had received "lots of medals'' from the Cuban government and that he and his wife had met and spent an evening with Fidel Castro in 1995.

The affidavit alleges that the Cuban Intelligence Service often had "communicated with its clandestine agents in the United States by broadcasting encrypted radio messages from Cuba on shortwave radio frequencies'' and that the couple has "an operable shortwave radio in their apartment and they told an FBI source that they have used it to receive messages.''

The Justice Department says the spy episode began to unravel when the FBI in April 2009 launched an undercover operation "to convince the couple that they had been contacted by a Cuban intelligence officer and to ascertain the scope of their activities for the CuIS.''

It says an undercover FBI source posing as a Cuban intelligence officer approached Kendall Myers, saying that he had been sent to contact Myers by a Cuban intelligence official.

"We have been very cautious, careful with our moves and, uh, trying to be alert to any surveillance,'' the Justice Department quotes Kendall Myers as saying to the FBI source.

[cosmikdebris]

[From the New York Times (link): The Times article implies that they were transmitting, but it seems more likely they were getting direction from the commies via the numbers slut on 43 meters. --L.]

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department charged Friday that a former State Department analyst and his wife worked as spies for Cuba for nearly 30 years, using a short-wave radio to pass on secret diplomatic information to their Cuban handlers.

Officials said the couple, Walter K. Myers, 72, and Gwendolyn S. Myers, 71, received little in the way of compensation from the Cubans except for the short-wave radio and some travel expenses. Rather, the officials said, the couple appears to have been driven by their strong affinity for Cuba and their bitterness toward “American imperialism.”

“We think they did it because they love Cuba,” said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case.

The Myerses, who live in Washington, were arrested on Thursday and charged in a grand jury indictment unsealed Friday with serving as illegal agents of the Cuban government and wire fraud. A defense lawyer declined to comment on the charges.

The case had been under investigation for three years but intensified two months ago, when an undercover agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, posing as a Cuban agent, approached Mr. Myers. That led to a series of meetings in which the Justice Department said that Mr. Myers and his wife made incriminating admissions about their decades-long work for Cuba.

Mr. Myers began working as a contract instructor at the State Department in 1977 and rose to the position of senior analyst with top-secret security clearance, specializing in European affairs. He retired from the department in 2007.

In the indictment, the Justice Department said that Mr. Myers examined some 200 intelligence reports that dealt with Cuba in 2006 and 2007, many of them classified or top-secret reports that were unrelated to his own duties at the State Department.

While some of the material that the government says the Myerses passed on to Cuba apparently related to State Department personnel and internal policy matters, the indictment does not detail the bulk of the material or the sensitivity of it.

David Kris, the assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department, called the Myerses’ activity for Cuba “incredibly serious.”

The indictment and the government’s supporting material say the Myerses were recruited as spies during an academic trip to Cuba in 1978.

In a diary entry that the Justice Department said Mr. Myers wrote at the time of the trip, he expressed his passion for Cuba and its Communist revolutionary goals and his distaste for “American imperialism” and the United States’ indifference to medical care, the poor and other basic public needs. “Cuba is so exciting!” he wrote, adding that “the revolution has released enormous potential and liberated the Cuban spirit.”

The government alleged that soon after their return to the United States, the Myerses began using Morse code, encrypted messages and the short-wave radio to pass sensitive diplomatic information to Havana. They met Fidel Castro on a clandestine trip to Cuba in 1995 and made trips over the years to meet Cuban contacts in Trinidad and Tobago, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Jamaica, the government charged.

It appears from government documents that suspicions among American counterintelligence officials about a possible security leak within the State Department first led the authorities to focus on Mr. Myers two or three years ago.

This April, an undercover agent from the F.B.I., posing as a Cuban official, approached Mr. Myers outside the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, where he taught. The agent said he had instructions to contact him concerning the thawing diplomatic changes in the air between Cuba and the United States. The agent offered Mr. Myers a cigar and wished him a happy birthday.

The agent directed Mr. Myers to search out State Department information about Cuba, and at one in a series of follow-up meetings, Mr. Myers and his wife told the agent that they hoped to “sail home” to Cuba some day on their sailboat, the government said.

The couple also expressed some mixed emotions, saying that they were “burned out” by their clandestine activity yet wanted to continue to help Cubans because of their strong ties.

“It’s forever,” the affidavit quoted Mr. Myers as telling the agent. “You know, it’s like Fidel. It’s forever.”

[L Cee]

In the Washington Post it is stated that they started using encrypted e-mails to pass information. Sad, sad, sad even the spies are moving away from SW. Come on...real spies use sw. What has the world come to? It's just like these new fangled e-QSLs the Pirates are using. They aren't REAL QSL's. A real QSL is hand written on paper and sent through the postal mail. Damn ! What's going to happen to the drop operators that supplement their social security checks with the occasional extra postal stamps they pilfer from the reception reports? I guess it's Davey Jones Retirement Home for them......sad.  A real spy message is broadcast through the static on shortwave. E-mail indeed ....pish!!!