A former State Department analyst, a privileged great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell who became a spy for Cuba, defended his decades of work for Fidel Castro before being sentenced Friday to life in prison.
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Prosecutor Gordon Harvey described the couple as "traitors." If they loved the Cuban people so much, Mr. Harvey said, why didn't Mr. Myers just donate his wealth to the underprivileged there? They admired the Castro revolution, but didn't defect because they only wanted to admire the revolution "from a safe distance," Mr. Harvey said.
Code-named Agent 202 by Cuban intelligence, Mr. Myers and his wife, Agent 123, were recruited in the late 1970s amid Cold War tensions, the couple admitted.
He went to work for the State Department, gaining "top secret" security clearances to carry out espionage, Federal Bureau of Investigation counter-intelligence investigators alleged.
Mr. Myers is believed to have stolen classified data from his work as an official in the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research. He had access to valuable information during the many flare-ups in U.S. relations with Cuba, from refugee crises to Cuba's hardships amid a tightened U.S. embargo under the Helms-Burton law.
The FBI declined to characterize the specific information he sold. But prosecutors noted in court filings that Cuban intelligence has been known to resell information to other countries, including Russia and China, as well as to such groups as the Irish Republican Army.
Before they were arrested in June 2009, the couple sent encrypted messages via shortwave radio and passed information in discreet shopping-cart handoffs at a Washington supermarket, and during trips to Trinidad, Brazil and elsewhere.