Recent Headlines

US analyst, wife sentenced for spying for Cuba

By PETE YOST, Associated Press
July 16, 2010

WASHINGTON – The 73-year-old great grandson of Alexander Graham Bell was sentenced Friday to life in prison without parole for quietly spying for Cuba for nearly a third of a century from inside the State Department. His wife was sentenced to 5 1/2 years.

Retired intelligence analyst Kendall Myers said he meant his country no harm and stole secrets only to help Cuba's people who "have good reason to feel threatened" by U.S. intentions of ousting the communist Castro government.

But U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said Myers and his 72-year-old wife, Gwendolyn, had betrayed America and should receive heavy punishment.

"You never know what the effect will be" from stealing classified information, said the judge. Someone "could be killed."

Justice Department prosecutor Michael Harvey said the couple received medals from Cuban intelligence and were flown to the island nation for a visit with Fidel Castro in 1995. They pleaded guilty last November.

The couple's overriding objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution, Myers told Walton. He said that he and his wife tried to accurately report what U.S. policy was toward Cuba, to warn Cuba and to try to assess the nature of any threat.

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

In a sentencing memo to the judge, prosecutors said Myers, a descendant of Bell, the inventor of the first practical telephone, was a child of wealth and privilege, attended a private boarding school in Pennsylvania and Brown University and obtained a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University.

"Kendall Myers could have been anything he wanted to be," they wrote. "He chose to be a Cuban spy."

According to prosecutors, Myers, who began teaching at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute in 1978, was contacted by the Cuban intelligence service to be a covert agent, and he recruited Gwendolyn in 1979. The couple married three years later. The Cubans referred to him as Agent 202, his wife as Agent E-634.

Myers rose to director of European studies at the Institute, and then in the eight years before he retired in 2007 he was a senior intelligence analyst at State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Prosecutor Harvey said Kendall Myers had daily access to classified information and pursued government colleagues for more.

Court documents described the couple's spycraft changing with the times, beginning with code messages over a short-wave radio and shopping carts exchanged in a grocery. By the time they retired from the work in 2007, they were said to be sending encrypted e-mails from Internet cafes.

At the same time, they were enjoying the fruits of living in the United States, spending inherited wealth on a yacht, said Harvey.

One of the couple's lawyers, Tom Green, said the two lived a very modest lifestyle.

Divergent views of loyalty and country dominated the hourlong sentencing hearing.

"The United States is not a perfect nation," Walton said, noting that he has ancestors who were born into slavery. The judge told Myers that "neither is Cuba perfect." It is "not a beacon of liberty."

If they felt so strongly, he told the couple, "you should have defected" to Cuba.

Prosecutors had written that Mrs. Myers could have faced 10 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines. Defense attorney Green argued for less because she has suffered a heart attack and minor strokes and the full amount "could be a life sentence."

Walton gave her 81 months, with time off for the 14 months she has already served. That works out to a sentence of just over 5 1/2 years.

The sentencing came just a week after the U.S. swapped 10 deep-cover Russian spies to Russia for four men serving sentences for betraying Moscow to the West. The 10 were allowed to plead guilty to being unregistered foreign agents and then were deported.

Unlike the Myerses, who are U.S. citizens, the 10 Russian spies were all foreigners, mostly Russians, and the government said it had watched and tracked them for more than a decade and saw no benefit to be gained from imprisoning them. The government said the 10 had not transferred any secret information to the Russians.

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 during that questioning, though Green disputed that. He said Myers had worked diligently to recall all information relevant to the criminal case.

Kendall Myers was caught in an FBI sting operation launched after he retired from the government. He was videotaped telling an undercover agent, posing as a Cuban 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.

In June 2009, right after the arrests, Fidel Castro questioned the 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.

The Myerses have six children and seven grandchildren, and the judge agreed to recommend that the Bureau of Prisons lock the couple up near each other to make visits easier on family members.

The couple agreed to forfeit $1.7 million, the amount Kendall Myers was accused of defrauding the government of by receiving a federal salary while working for Cuba.

Cuba set to free 52 political prisoners

By Isabel Sanchez
Agence France-Presse
July 08, 2010

HAVANA – Cuba agreed to free 52 political prisoners beginning Thursday, in a breakthrough church-state deal set to yield the biggest prisoner release since President Raul Castro formally took power in 2008.

The release, to include five dissidents, exceeds a bold demand by a hunger-striker near death that some two dozen ill political prisoners be freed in the only one-party communist regime in the Americas.

The five dissidents were to be freed "in the coming hours" and would travel "shortly" to Spain with their families, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the archbishop of Havana, announced late Wednesday.

The breakthrough talks Wednesday involved Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, who said the pending move opens "a new era."

"We are quite satisfied. A new era is opening in Cuba, with the will to settle once and for all the political prisoner issue," he said.

Later, he told reporters that "the Spanish government has accepted the proposal that all those who are released travel to Spain, if they so wish."

The pending release of the 52 -- who were part of a group of 75 dissidents rounded up in 2003 and sentenced to jail terms of six to 28 years -- was announced at a meeting of Castro, Ortega and Moratinos, a statement from the Archdiocese of Havana said.

Moratinos said that Castro, during their six-hour meeting, assured him that relatives and the exiles themselves would be able to return to visit Cuba and that the property of dissidents who leave the country would not be confiscated -- measures that would imply a change in Cuban policy.

The remaining 47 dissidents will be freed within the next three to four months, Roman Catholic church officials said in the statement.

The Cuban government has insisted it would not be "blackmailed."

But it is also keen to deflect attention from the case of hunger striker Guillermo Farinas, protesting with his life on the line; his and other recent hunger strikes are huge political embarrassments for Havana, drawing an international outcry.

The church statement did not identify the political prisoners to be freed, nor did it mention Farinas, who is said to be near death from a months-long hunger strike.

Bishop Arturo Gonzalez visited with the hunger striker and was told Farinas was waiting for the actual release of the five dissidents before he ends his hunger strike.

The head of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, described the announced prisoner releases as "excellent" news and said he hoped it would prompt Farinas to end his strike.

Farinas's deteriorating condition has been reported, unusually, in the official Communist Party newspaper Granma, in what observers say is an attempt to defuse international criticism should he die.

The psychologist and online journalist has been refusing food since February while demanding the release of 25 political prisoners with failing health.

Farinas, 48, said he could end his strike when the five dissidents are freed, having dropped his original demand for all 25 once church mediation was under way.

"I am skeptical. Until our brothers are on the street, we do not trust the authorities," Farinas said by phone from hospital in the central city of Santa Clara.

Other foes of the government voiced surprise.

"I am stunned -- we were expecting 10, 12, maybe 15 to be freed and then maybe in six months some more," said Laura Pollan, a leader of the Ladies in White group of family members of the 75 political prisoners picked up in the 2003 sweep.

"I will believe it when I see all 75 out on the street," she said.

The Cuban Human Rights and National Reconciliation Commission -- an outlawed but tolerated dissident information clearinghouse -- estimates there are 167 political prisoners in the Caribbean nation of more than 11 million people.

The church began a dialogue with the government on May 19. As a result of the talks, one prisoner was released and another 12 were transferred to facilities closer to their families.

Moratinos has said if his visit was a success, it would help toward lifting the EU common position on Cuba, which has, since 1996, conditioned relations between the European Union and Havana on progress in human rights here.

He also said he hoped the United States, Cuba's longtime foe in the region, would "take note" of Havana's decision to free dissidents.

Statement by the Cuban National Assembly on the recent Israeli flotilla attack:

June 4, 2010

"Several days have passed since the Israeli Army launched its premeditated and criminal attack against the fleet that was taking to the Gaza Strip -a Palestinian territory subjected to a cruel and inhuman military blockade- very much needed humanitarian help, in a supreme gesture of solidarity.

"Governments, parliaments and institutions from many parts of the world have denounced the assassination perpetrated, and have demanded that the international community to express its strongest condemnation of this action carried out by the Israeli government.

"The statement by the UN Security Council, in spite of regretting what has happened and asking for an impartial investigation, does not vigorously condemn Israel and does not mention the need to put an end, unconditionally, to the prolonged siege laid to the Gaza Strip.

"The Commission for International Relations of the National Assembly of the People’s Power of the Republic of Cuba considers that the only solution possible is that the Israeli government immediately puts an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip and that the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to create an independent State in its legitimate territories prevails.

"It is urgent to prevent, by way of the most determined action of the international community, serious crimes like these remaining unpunished, and that the use of time-wasting strategies on the part of Israel and its allies makes it possible to maintain, and even intensify in the future, the current and unsustainable situation of the Palestinian people."

-Commission for International Relations of the National Assembly of the People’s Power of the Republic of Cuba.