Ex-State Dept. Worker Spied for Cuba, Gets Life

Last Updated 2:58 p.m. ET

A U.S. judge has sentenced a former State Department worker who is the great grandson of Alexander Graham Bell to life in prison without possibility of parole for spying for Cuba, and sentenced the man's wife to more than 5 years behind bars for helping her husband steal U.S. secrets.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers betrayed the United States and should receive heavy punishment for having done so.

In a 10-minute explanation to the judge of his conduct, Kendall Myers said his goal was to pass along information about U.S. policies toward Cuba, a nation that he said feared the United States because of its opposition to the Cuban regime.

Kendall Myers, 73, said he stole secrets with no intent to harm the United States.

The judge said he was "perplexed" at how Myers could have the notion that he was not hurting the U.S., given the level of antagonism between the two countries.

"The Cuban people feel threatened" and "they have good reason to feel threatened" because the U.S. has pursued a policy of regime change in Cuba, Myers replied.

"Part of our motivation," Myers said of himself and his wife, was to report as accurately as possible about what he thought U.S. policy was toward Cuba, to warn Cuba and to try to assess the nature of the threat.

"At the expense of the United States," Walton interjected.

Prosecutors said Myers, a descendant of Bell, the inventor of the first practical telephone, was a child of wealth and privilege and could have been anything he wanted to be, but instead chose to spy for Cuba for 30 years from inside the State Department.

His wife, Gwendolyn, 72, was sentenced to 81 months in prison, with time off for the 14 months she has already served. That works out to a sentence of just over 5 and 1/2 years for her.

According to federal prosecutors, the two stole U.S. secrets and gave them to Cuba for nearly 30 years because of a shared communist ideology and an adoration of the Cuban revolution.

Justice Department prosecutor Michael Harvey said that Myers and his wife were given medals by Cuban intelligence officials and that in 1995, the two were flown to Cuba where they had a private audience with President Fidel Castro.

Kendall Myers had daily access to classified information and he pursued his colleagues in government for more, said Harvey.

The sentences for the couple are the outcome of a plea deal driven by the government's need to find out all of the secrets the two stole.

Pursuing the same criminal charges through a contested trial risked further significant harm to the national security, prosecutors said. The government has not revealed the secrets the two took.

Kendall Myers was contacted by the Cuban intelligence service to be a covert agent, and he recruited Gwendolyn in 1979, prosecutors said. The couple married three years later. He was Agent 202, his wife Agent E-634.

In 1978, Myers began teaching at the Foreign Service Institute within the State Department and eventually served as director of European studies. He retired in 2007.

When the FBI launched a sting operation that brought the couple down, Kendall Myers was videotaped telling an undercover agent that he wanted to resume his work for Cuba.

"I was actually thinking it would be fun to get back into it," Kendall Myers said on the videotape, according to the prosecutor.

A bureau operative approached Myers on the street on the defendant's birthday, April 15, gave him a cigar, said he knew his Cuban handler and asked that they meet later, according to court papers. The Myerses met three times with the operative at Washington hotels, caught on videotape making incriminating statements.

In June 2009, right after the arrests, Castro questioned their timing - just 24 hours after the Organization of American States voted to lift a decades-old suspension of Cuba's membership in that group.

"Doesn't the story of Cuban spying seem really ridiculous to everyone?" Castro asked, without commenting on its validity.

There was no immediate reaction from Havana on Friday to news of the sentences.

Kendall Myers has taught English to non-English-speaking prisoners and has helped illiterate inmates learn to read, according to court papers.

As for telling the FBI what they did, the government says the picture is mixed but not enough to shelve the plea deal.

There were times when Kendall Myers, in particular, gave inconsistent or uncooperative responses or was intentionally withholding information, the government said in court papers. Prosecutors are "certainly troubled" by that assessment, but the government has received all of the value it believes it is going to derive from the debriefing process, the court papers concluded.

The couple agreed to forfeit $1.7 million to the government, the amount Kendall Myers defrauded the government out of by receiving a federal salary when he actually was working for the Cuban government.

Defense attorney Tom Green said that the Myerses had undergone hundreds of hours of debriefings by interrogators from multiple federal agencies.

The FBI concluded that Kendall Myers had withheld some information. Green disputed that, saying Myers had worked diligently to recall all of the information that was relevant to the criminal case.

Green pleaded for a shorter sentence for Gwendolyn Myers than the 90 months she could have gotten, saying that she has suffered a heart attack and a couple of minor strokes.

"Ninety months could be a life sentence," Green told the judge.

The Myerses have six children and seven grandchildren and they requested prisons that are near each other to make it possible for family visits.

The judge agreed to recommend to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons that the couple be imprisoned near each other.

The judge cautioned, however, that prisons are places where inmates can readily be radicalized and that he has concerns Myers would impart his political views on them.